Pan Sonic + DJ Spooky

Tonight, at Rome's beautiful new Auditorium, you can still smell the strong scent of fresh wood, but there's also something else in the air. On the bill are two performances that draw the crowd out for a big occasion: alongside the young curious music fans, there are well-dressed gentlemen and (self-styled?) intellectuals, plus the usual assorted sprinkling of VIPs.

The first part of the show, handed to DJ Spooky, is by no means treated as a mere opening act. In fact, a few people leave right after watching the American perform, a sign that some had come purely for that.

DJ Spooky, a multimedia artist raised in the glorious tradition of New York hip-hop DJs and steeped in the cult of Grandmaster Flash, "builds" music and film by recycling and re-editing pre-existing material. On his website, a privileged window into his work, you can find a few short results of his modus operandi.

For the occasion he tackles a remixed version of "Nascita di una nazione" ("The Birth of a Nation", 1915), the famous masterpiece (albeit racist) film by David Wark Griffith. His intervention is twofold: working on the images and creating the soundtrack live, following similarly cut-and-paste methods for both. The result, it must be said, is less gripping than the premise suggested, though still interesting. The racism and moral unacceptability of "The Birth of a Nation" come through clearly, but they do so in the original film too. Both the visual and musical results are pleasant, but neither is earth-shattering. The music especially turns out to be a nice, well-crafted piece of instrumental trip hop, of the kind we've already heard plenty of by now. The (progressive) ladies in fur coats seem to be enjoying it a lot.

Shortly after, it's the turn of Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen: Pan Sonic. The first surprise, for those unfamiliar with them, is the austerity of their stage setup and equipment, an austerity that borders on outright poverty. I'll let you know in advance, though, that it proves a winning choice. For starters, there's not a laptop in sight on stage. Not bad for a group billed as "electronic". On a table, just a handful of objects are tasked with creating the sound of the Finnish duo: these are some of the instruments built for them by Jari Lehtinen, who has always made their gear. There are oscillators, a "box" that handles the beats, as well as a kind of homemade synthesizer. One of them is even mounted on a typewriter: who knows if it's on stage right now… The big screen behind them shows nothing but a black vertical line on a white background. Nothing else. It's their faithful oscilloscope.

The two Finns deliver a surprisingly physical performance, hammering away at knobs and dials, thrashing about, gritting their teeth, sweating as if they were Slayer. For those who know (or rediscover) them, many tracks from the first two discs of "Kesto", their latest effort, turn up here, played one after another without pause, in a single sonic flow. Massive basslines, relentless rhythms, vibrations, sonic assaults, moments that are almost danceable. Everything is perfect. Bare, direct, uncompromising.

The black line oscillates and fragments in response to the sounds Vainio and Väisänen produce: it's the perfect visual accompaniment to what's being offered to our ears. Because Pan Sonic make music out of what is normally background, substrate, the base on which melodies are built. It's a sublime coincidence with the great cellotex works by Burri covering the walls of the Auditorium's passageways. In reclaiming lesser, humbler materials as the subject of his own work, toward the end of his career, Alberto Burri gave the world a display of extraordinary, brilliant coherence, making cellotex (the material on which he had until then "rested" his sacchi, his combustions, his plastics) the sole protagonist of his work. Pan Sonic use oscillations, background noise, pulses as the only elements of their sound, granting new expressive power to what is usually mere accompaniment, relegated to the background.

That's enough to unsettle anyone still attached to Griffith's grandiloquence and the "full" sound of gala nights at the Auditorium. The audience, scandalized, abandons their seats. The exodus begins with the first sounds (immediately extremely powerful and violent) and proves unstoppable. Vainio and Väisänen will end up granting an encore to a mere handful, since almost everyone has already left.

By the end of the show, in my row of sixteen seats only four of us remained, and the ratio was the same throughout the whole Auditorium. Among those who stayed, you could hear sarcastic comments or outright mockery, when they weren't simply muttering "How awful". But that's also what made this concert exceptional. It wasn't just about witnessing a moment of rare grace from an outstanding duo. It was also about witnessing a revolution.

Let's venture a claim: this is the true revolutionary music of today. Pan Sonic carry on that work of upsetting the respectable classes once carried out by rock'n'roll, by Elvis, by the Beatles, by the Rolling Stones, or by those Suicide to whom they're often compared. But unlike those, the new revolution plays out within the space of a bedroom. In the headphones of an iPod. It's an individual, silent revolution, and when it tries to communicate itself to those swept up in it, it does so in a totally incomprehensible way. That's why the ladies in fur coats storm off indignant, just like the mothers who fifty years ago dragged their daughters to Elvis concerts. Here lies the divide between generations, and also within a generation that, in part, tonight pays tribute to two of its most enlightened bards.

The indecency, the profound outrage of Pan Sonic lies in offering no foothold whatsoever to common taste, not even to that of seasoned listeners still wedded to the god Guitar. In having, as accompaniment, instead of abstract images or films, a minimal black line stirred only by their sounds. In not being remotely likeable, in not offering a shred of melody across more than an hour, in granting no foothold at all, save for a few crushingly heavy rhythms. In refusing to lean on the common notion of what is deemed "beautiful".

More or less consciously, Pan Sonic have become the sound of Munch's Scream. That's why they're so outrageous, so uncomfortable, so unbearable for anyone unwilling to let even a breath of air disturb their house of cards built on certainties. That's why, tonight, they gave life to a concert, or rather, an event, that was truly memorable.

Ride the wave of great music

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