Panoptique Electrical – Decades (2001-2021)

0

Jason Sweeney’s debut Panoptique Electrical album, 2008’s Let The Darkness At You was an abrupt change of pace from the experimental electronic leaning pop that he was renowned for via his Pretty Boy Crossover duo. These stately pieces of electronic ambience were so well constructed, so minimal and self assured that at the time you started to wonder if there was anything Sweeney couldn’t do. Well it turns out he later played in a bunch of bands with across numerous genres like Other Peoples Children, Mist & Sea, Simpatico and School of Two as well as becoming a filmmaker, so I’d say he answered that question.

Sweeney has the unique ability to make compilations of totally unrelated music created for entirely different purposes into unique compelling and coherent albums. He did it with Let The Darkness At You album he’s done so again with this his most recent album, a 2LP 31 track collection of 20 years in the life of Panoptique Electrical. Give that the pieces come from a mixture of dance, theatre and film, are all paid commissions and are the result with a collaboration with numerous different directors this is a pretty remarkable feat. I guess the lesson is that you can never outrun yourself – not that you’d want to if you were making music like this.

There’s a certain grandeur to his music, these big swells of sound that often rise out of a deep drone and are imbued with a certain pathos, that owe a lot to the warmth and melancholy of ambient music, yet equally to Alan Splet’s incredible sound design. Things tend to move slowly in Sweeney’s world, so these transcendent moments of illumination feel well earned. Occasionally piano appears, tentative notes that seem to drift in and carry so much emotional weight. Though he’s also joined at times by the cello of Zoe Barry and vocals of Caroline Daish, but in a way it all submerges into the whole.

This is not an album were you can trainspot the individual parts, rather it’s music that slowly drifts into your soul and you forget you’re even listening – which I guess is the point. Freed from the productions they were originally tethered to, from the distraction of film, theatre or dance Sweeney’ sound envelop us, we sink into them until they become our world and we just drift inside these highly emotive ill defined electrics and warm bottom end drones.

Sweeney sees this double LP as growing up in public, yet perhaps the evolution is only clear to him. I keep looking for that moment where I can stroke my chin and say ‘oh yeah that’s the young Sweeney, how naïve!’ but its simply not there. If anything there’s a real consistency. Perhaps it’s the mastering by Lawrence English, but I don’t think so. Tonally, structurally sonically there’s a really consistent feel to this. From the outset even in those heady days of 2001 his music felt like something new and something special. Twenty years hasn’t changed that one little bit.

Share.

About Author

Bob is the features editor of Cyclic Defrost. He is also evil. You should not trust the opinions of evil people.

Leave A Reply