GENRE: Electronic
LABEL: Transgressive
REVIEWED: July 16, 2024
Through decayed beats and gothic atmospheres, the musician formerly known as Aristophanes transforms sexual desire into an existential threat.
For 潘PAN, the body is a bomb about to explode. On the 2015 Grimes track “Scream,” her voice fluttered across Mandarin lyrics about howls packed deep in the lungs like gunpowder; between delicate rap verses, she let those subdued screams erupt. The Taiwanese musician born Pan Wei Ju, previously known as Aristophanes, has toyed with the boundary between composed beauty and volcanic monstrosity ever since. On Pan the Pansexual, her first full-length release since renaming herself, 潘PAN turns her attention toward the existential threat of sexual desire, and how its satisfaction can liquefy one’s sense of identity just as easily as it can crystallize it.
In 2017, 潘PAN followed her indelible Grimes feature with the mixtape Humans Become Machines, a lively, populous release that showcased a wide range of vocal moods: playful, introspective, frenetic, furious. It was a colorful affair. By contrast, Pan the Pansexual crouches in an unrelentingly bleak corner. Its beats lurch and scuttle, decaying out of time, drumming up echoes of 2010s goth records like Gazelle Twin’s Unflesh.
On “Embers,” 潘PAN raps in Mandarin and sings in English over a jazzy loop whose swung rhythm scrapes against the oppressive atmosphere. The skittering cymbals hint at levity, but the synthesizer washes and pained lyrics hover in the gloom. “If I somehow die in my endless depression, I want all my beautiful illusions to keep alive,” she sings in a breathy upper register while a minor-key piano figure twinkles deep in the fog. On “Reborn,” one of two tracks produced by cloud rap phenom Clams Casino, 潘PAN braids together wordless keens that call to mind Jarboe’s solo work. Here, she envisions new life emerging from violent death: “Choke me slowly with your old scars/Make me bloom once again with your blood,” she sings right before a string interlude injects a sense of old-world gothic romance into Clams’ digital static.
Similar tensions simmer throughout the album. When they do resolve, they pour forth in a fury. On “FNGRMEHRDR,” over a bassline descended from Le Tigre’s electroclash classic “Deceptacon,” 潘PAN sings about a voracious desire that belies deeper longing: “I never, ever felt this lonely/Fuck it, finger me harder.” Her Mandarin lyrics, delivered at a more agitated clip, depict a totally alienated sexual encounter. “My bones are soft like mud now, my consciousness collapses, when you kiss me like the way flood spreads,” she raps. “I turned out to be a lonely person since I met you… you are making me incomplete.”
Pan the Pansexual arrives during the summer of Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish, two artists who sing about queer sex as neon relief from uncertainty and repression. Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova” is an outpouring of sensual joy, while Eilish’s “LUNCH” hits like a long exhale at the end of a breath held for years. 潘PAN’s own grappling with sexual identity traces a more tortured path. What if pursuing your secret hunger didn’t calm the incalculable questions writhing in your mind, but only deepened them? What if getting off didn’t actually mean getting out? That’s the fear weighing heavy over this album—that it’s not always so easy to come home into your own body. Sometimes the bomb goes off and the question hangs in the air, unanswered.