Swan2

Tujiko Noriko - Kuro (OST)
Format: LP / CD / Digital
Label: PAN (ENTOPIA)
Cat.No. PAN 89
Release Date: 26 April 2019 
Pre-order album: bit.ly/2TNq3yB / bit.ly/2F3mN9Q

Written and directed by Joji Koyama and Tujiko Noriko, Kuro tells the tale of Romi, a Japanese woman living in the suburbs of Paris with her paraplegic lover Milou. Tending to Milou by day and working in a karaoke bar by night, Romi reminisces about a time she and Milou once lived together in Japan with a mysterious ailing man named Mr. Ono. Weaving together personal history, anecdotes and myths, her stories soon turn ominous.

When we first decided to ‘split’ the film into what might be described as two parallel layers — the narrated story and the visual story — we found that it opened up an ‘in-between’ space, a space where what is heard and seen continually wrestle with one another. We envisaged that the true setting of the film would emerge from this friction, as something imagined and projected by the audience. After a few screenings we were struck by how some audience members would refer to scenes or events in the film that, for us, did not take place… We both thought of the music of Kuro as a score to this space in-between.

-Joji Koyama

Composed and recorded during the editing of the film in Berlin, the Kuro OST by Tujiko Noriko (with contributions from Joji Koyama, Sam Britton and Will Worsely), is a crucial and integral part of the film, acting not only as a glue to bind the layers of the film together, but along with the sonic palette of the film’s sound design, evokes it’s claustrophobic atmospheres and moments of haunting beauty.

I tried to think of the pieces in abstract terms, like moods and atmospheres. In a way, the process was quite similar to how I usually make music, in the sense that I have images in my head. Of course in this case there were actual images and a lot of them very close to me, but I didn't want to get overly conscious about them either—I didn't want to get stuck by trying to be too specific.

-Tujiko Noriko

The music, which in the film is largely heard in tandem to the narrating voice of Tujiko Noriko (who also stars as Romi), is presented and arranged here as a separate piece in its own right.

Written and produced by Tujiko Noriko. Mixed by Sam Britton and Will Worsley at Coda to Coda, London.
The album is mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin featuring photography by Joji Koyama and layout by Bill Kouligas and Johannes Schnatmann.

ENTOPIA is the latest offshoot series from PAN seeking to amplify and redefine our ideas of what a soundtrack can be. The series will survey critical works across the spectrum from musical composers on PAN and beyond, commissioned for the worlds of film, art, performance, installation works, theatre, dance and fashion.

@tujikonoriko
http://p-a-n.org

Kuro (OST)

Tujiko Noriko - Karaoke Theme (PAN 89)

Tujiko Noriko - At The Sea (PAN 89)

Tujiko Noriko - Milou (PAN 89)

Tujiko Noriko, Sam Britton, Will Worsley - Gondola Song (PAN 89)

Tujiko Noriko - Broken Records (PAN 89)

Joji Koyama - Night Park (PAN 89)

Tujiko Noriko - Romi and Kuro (PAN 89)

Joji Koyama - Cyclamen (PAN 89)

arms length away

Amnesia Scanner — Tearless
Format: LP / DL
Cat.No. PAN 108
Release Date: 19 June 2020
Purchase: pan.lnk.to/Tearless

Berlin-based duo Amnesia Scanner have announced the impending release of their sophomore LP, Tearless, a sonic reflection of how it feels to experience Earth at a time when collapse is emerging as the prevailing narrative. As Amnesia Scanner founders, Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala watch their icy home country of Finland thaw- the staggering scale of political recalibration and the worldwide climate crisis blows open old norms. “There’s a looming sense of radical change,” they noted pre-COVID, connecting the period of making the album to a fin de siecle horror and curiosity regarding what new world is being ushered in. Tearless has been referred to as “a breakup album with the planet”, to which Amnesia Scanner responds, on the LP’s closing track: “You will be fine, if we can help you lose your mind.” Amnesia Scanner are previewing the album in the form of a video for their accidental quarantine anthem “AS Going,” a clip featuring a cascade of images of spiraling humans.

Tearless marks a turning point in the duo’s trajectory, one begun in 2014 with the AS Live [][][][][] mixtape, followed by audio play Angels Rig Hook, two EP’s for Young Turks, and their 2018 debut album, Another Life (PAN). For Amnesia Scanner in 2020, the walls of the nightclubs, galleries, and institutions fall away and are replaced by full-scale theatrical productions complete with jumbotron stages, animatronics, and a surrealist costumed cast (literally so in the XL version of the album’s live show, Anesthesia Scammer). Likewise, the musical scope of the album is expansive, with guest vocalists — the Peruvian artist Lalita and the Brazillian DJ/producer LYZZA — descending into a vast uncanny valley of sound. With the crossfader on Tearless sitting closer to pop than abstraction, so too does the audience for this record widen in scope. Opener “AS Enter” sets a sombre tone until the fucking riffs of the second track (the titular, Lalita-helmed “AS Tearless”) make clear there’s plenty of roaring to come. A feature from metalcore band Code Orange on “AS Flat” follows, along with “AS Trouble” (feat. Oracle, the third, machinic ghost-member of Amnesia Scanner) and together they hit as black-metal-gaze dirges. Closing Tearless is the sadboy grunge of “AS U Will Be Fine” with a clear statement of intent: doom, despair, insanity, absurdity, it’s all natural, all cathartic, and all OK.

For the art direction of this release, Amnesia Scanner collaborators PWR scavenged the pop cultural unconscious, as if ventilating memory dissociated by trauma. The gatefold vinyl reveals a four-panel comic, full of iconic pre-millennial motifs, which arrive cut up and reassembled collage-style: fitting visuals for an album that channels Deftones as much as reggaeton, menace as much as the drop-outness of grunge. Refuse like the ‘90s and party like the ‘20s—if that seems senseless, you are doing it right.

The album is mastered by Enyang Urbiks, featuring visual direction from PWR Studio.

@amnesia-scanner
http://p-a-n.org

Tearless 

Amnesia Scanner - AS Flat (feat. Code Orange) (PAN 108)

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

Tujiko Noriko, Sam Britton, Will Worsley - Gondola Song (PAN 89)

PAN

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