Panoram – Everyone is a Door
Panoram is the epitome of a curiosity. Since first making waves with his 2012 debut 12”, the beguiling Accents on Scenario, he’s very much kept himself to himself. There have been occasional interviews and a sporadic trickle of new material on his Soundcloud profile, but little else. He cherishes his anonymity, refuses to release pictures of himself, and generally makes music that’s bafflingly hard to pigeonhole. We know this much: he’s Italian, based in Rome, and once attended the Red Bull Music Academy. That’s pretty much it. He’s a man who delights in flying under the radar, occasionally releasing music that impresses with its simple beauty and impressive inventiveness.
There’s a sheer bloody-mindedness to his approach that’s admirable. While shrouding yourself in mystery is not a new trick, few manage to keep up the façade for very long. That Panoram has is impressive, in a way. The fact that his music is so difficult to define – think atmospheric sketches that veer from ambient jazz-funk to 21st century telephone hold music, via vintage electronics and Balearica – makes the lack of explanation even more intriguing. He seems to have no clear plan, other than to make the music he wants to. If people enjoy it, then that’s great; if they don’t, he won’t lose any sleep.
In some ways, Everyone is a Door, his debut album for Lindsay Todd’s ever-impressive Firecracker Recordings imprint, is strangely infuriating. For starters, it’s surprisingly short, clocking in at a miserly 30 minutes. Most of the tracks are short by electronic music standards, clocking in at well under three minutes, and in some cases less than two minutes. It’s a collection of sketches or incidental pieces – the kind of thing you’d once find on albums of library music, with short, atmospheric pieces intended for use on cheap films and TV shows. Yet it’s not library music in the traditional sense, and there’s no indication of Panoram’s inspiration or its intended use. These are just musical moments; largely inspired, but frustratingly fleeting.
This is not to say that Everyone is a Door is a poor album. In fact, it’s a bit of a belter. Panoram excels at painting pictures with sound, delivering mood pieces that are in turns dreamy, inspired, unusual, eccentric and otherworldly. His inspirations are manifold – classic ambient, jazz, IDM, library music, Vangelis, instrumental hip-hop, early avant-garde synthesizer music, Eric Satie and Boards of Canada, for starters – but the music he makes rarely sounds like the work of anyone else. As a result, the 11 tracks (12 if you include the secret track) are mostly magical.
Opening with 90 seconds of backwards synthesizer melodies that sound like some scrambled transmission from a place beyond the stars (“Serenity Cosmos”), Everyone is a Door whizzes by in the blink of an eye. Along the way, you’ll find tracks that sound like Dam Funk on downers (“Awake Walk”), classic late ‘90s ambient fused with sparse jazz-funk (the hissing cymbals, dreamy pads and half asleep slap bass of “Alone in Hawaii”), sparse, bongo-laden glitch-scapes (“Harmony Study”) and lo-fi jungle crossed with drifting electronic textures (“A Replica of Yourself”).
With such mesmerizing glimpses of goodness, picking highlights is hard. There are, though, one or two moments of stunning brilliance. There’s the crusty analogue synthesizer melodies, head-nodding trip-hop breaks and warm bass of “Foxana”, and the all-to-short piano lament, “121212”. Equally as impressive is “Toluka Lake View”, a fuzzy, hissing, lucid exploration in the style of Aphex Twin circa Selected Ambient Works Volume 2. Best of all, though, is “The Pacific Command”, a woozy, saucer-eyed chunk of blissful Balearica that layers skittish bursts of jazz-funk bass and starburst electronics over dreamy washes of sound and syncopated handclaps. At three minutes, it seems all too short; I doubt I’ll be the last person to wish it could be twice as long.
The shortness of the tracks isn’t an issue – Everyone is a Door is a fine album as it is – though the quality is such that you do wish Panoram would allow tracks to unfurl slowly, rather than jotting down an idea then moving on. His ideas are so good that they’d warrant further development. Maybe this is something he’ll focus on more in future; if not, we’ll always be wondering what could be.
Matt Anniss
Tracklisting:
1. Serenity Cosmos
2. Awake Walk
3. Navelintdor
4. Alone In Hawaii
05. Harmony Study
06. Foxana
07. A Replica Of Yourself
08. 1212121212
09. The Pacific Command
10. Toluka Lake View
11. Tiny Little Faces
12. Ghost Track