Indira Paganotto’s debut on Pan-Pot’s Second State label delivers intriguing, disorientingly global vocal samples alongside spacey, restrained techno cuts.
The filtered opening kick bounces like a ball in a silent room, warning chords swelling larger and building a tension that is broken most unexpectedly into a psytrance-nodding stampede. A major source of intrigue on this release is Paganotto’s use of rich and surprising samples, which don’t often appear in this region of techno. On the title track, something which sounds like it might be the low, complex bellow of traditional throat singing from Tuva and northern Mongolia emerges out of the blue. In this style, the singer expertly manipulates the larynx to produce both fundamental pitch and overtones in an effort to animistically reproduce the sounds of nature. The sonic potential is self-evident, and here it infuses the track with mysterious, rich harmonics.
This is quickly interrupted by snatches of speech in French and what sounds like Russian. A vocal sample flickers in melodic pattern that sounds like it may have been broadcast from a Goa party deep within in the Indian subcontinent. It’s like a disco ball suddenly descended from the vaulted ceiling at the United Nations, suddenly transforming tense geopolitical debate into a delirious panlingual hootenanny. The Shlomi Aber remix takes it a level deeper, stripping back some of this clever international chaos in favor of a more uncompromising vortex of pure club techno.
The highly original choices in sound design abound throughout, in ‘Magnetic Pulse’, high intergalactic arps are accented by what sounds like the spinning of a loaded revolver chamber and echoing millisecond hiccups of what could be a voice before the track settles into a deep techno groove, the production and sound articulation clear as a bell.
The hi-pass filtered click of a kick forewarns the return of the mysterious interlocutors, chimes tingling like the soundtrack to a horror movie as men speaking Japanese echo and distort underneath, giving the track a kind of fearful impression. The closing track, ‘Cyber Slaves’, takes several turns; the whipping baseline building up nicely around an effective synth melody, which is swapped out halfway through for something even catchier, hat lines expertly dropping in and out to culminate in a slinky, futuristic techno bop.
-Winston Mann
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