Merzbow, Iggor Cavalera, Eraldo Bernocchi - Nocturnal Rainforest
Label: PAN
Cat.No.: PAN 154
Release Date: 03 October 2025
Purchase: pan.lnk.to/NocturnalRainforest

The first collaboration between Japanese noise titan Masami Akita, aka Merzbow, iconic Brazilian drummer and producer Iggor Cavalera and forward-thinking Italian guitarist and sound designer Eraldo Bernocchi, 'Nocturnal Rainforest' terraforms a sonic landscape that's almost overpoweringly dense and disorienting, but never aggressive or chaotic. It's a fully immersive experience that re-contextualizes the trio's years of work in extreme experimental music by concentrating on texture, atmosphere and sensory overload. The noise itself is used to provoke a refined level of focus; 'Nocturnal Rainforest' is mediative in its own way, enveloping listeners with waves of distortion, phantasmic unmetered rhythms and perplexing processed field recordings, but it's not intended for passive listening. Made using a fusion of bespoke techniques the trio have been developing for decades, it exists in a raw and mystifying liminal zone between the organic realm and the digital world - a place that's too hauntingly familiar to be ignored.

'Nocturnal Rainforest' is a product of each artist's ongoing musical evolution, powered by extreme music but tempered by deep listening techniques that expect presence rather than dissociation. On 'Swietnenia Macrophylla', evocative humid soundscapes provide a precarious sense of security at first, blurred at the edges by purring oscillations that mimic the jungle's fauna. And that peace is quickly ruptured by percussive, foghorn-like distortions that mark out the scale of the trio's vision. Not just raw noise, the rougher elements are cut with subtle waves of billowing ambience and muggy low- end drones before the track launches into a symphony of computerized stutters. There's a constant push and pull between organic and artificial sounds - before there's been time to acclimatize to the DAW corrupted noise, collaged tape saturations and slashed amplifier hum muddies the atmosphere, purposefully confusing the senses and obfuscating the sources.

And the thought is continued on 'Ceiba Pentandra' when the trio follow the jungle's teeming sonics with growling, whirring electronics and dense interference. What starts as birdsong and an choir of insects mutates into a wall of deafening, transcendent full-spectrum texture that cracks open like a slow-moving storm over a shadowy wilderness.

Merzbow, Iggor Cavalera, Eraldo Bernocchi - Swietenia Macrophylla

Merzbow, Iggor Cavalera, Eraldo Bernocchi - Ceiba Pentandra

Cyprien Gaillard - Retinal Rivalry
Label: PAN
Cat.No.: PAN 157
Release Date: 17 October 2025
Purchase: pan.lnk.to/RetinalRivalry

Retinal Rivalry is the soundtrack to Cyprien Gaillard’s new stereoscopic film, Retinal Rivalry (2024). It is an entrancing journey through Germany’s urban landscape and its layers of historical and social significance. Building on his previous exploration of the sculptural qualities of three-dimensional moving images, the work extends beyond the confines of the screen. By harnessing cutting-edge technology to its full potential, Gaillard offers an expanded, sharpened and deeply affecting novel view of the world around us.

Retinal Rivalry is named after the visual perception phenomenon that occurs when the brain receives two conflicting images at the same time. Instead of blending into one 3D image, the neural system alternates between prioritising one image while suppressing the other, causing confusion and discomfort for the viewer.

Gaillard’s film engages with these complexities of visual processing and the limitations of technology, collating visual information through exceptional, often tongue-in-cheek, shots that intertwine the inside and outside, the contained and dispersed, and the natural and built.

His camera adopts unusual viewpoints, shifting from smooth aerial perspectives to a rodent’s low gaze to the dizzying darting in and out on the bulbous nose of a sculpture, or a long shot of a train moving through a landscape, drawing us into a layered experience that teeters between a bad trip and unexpected beauty providing solace.

The film’s score draws from diverse sonic elements, bolstering its exploration of dissonance and synchrony. Indonesian instrumental music is reworked and combined with field recordings of heavy machinery rumbling and strangely melodic retching. The soundtrack also incorporates the opening lines to Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), along with its accompanying overture by German band Popol Vuh. 

The soundscape of Retinal Rivalry contrasts its images—what we see is often at odds with what we hear. Only one section lets sound and image converge: a fractured leg pumps the pedal of an interactive organ to play a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach that repeatedly falters.

The film Retinal Rivalry will be on view at Haus der Kunst in Munich from October 17, 2025, to March 8, 2026.

Cyprien Gaillard - Retinal Rivalry (PAN 157)

Label based in Berlin, est. 2008. http://www.p-a-n.org

This track is not available anymore.

Other tracks from PAN