Merzbow & Pan Sonic - Live at Victoriaville 2002.txt
Merzbow / Pan Sonic : the 20-05-2002 performance in Victoriaville, QC
This show was closing the FIMAV (Festival des Musiques Actuelles de Victoriaville) which is an annual event featuring live performances of contemporary music covering genres such as experimental, modern jazz and electro-accoustic, occuring each spring in the little town of Victoriaville, around 200 kilometers east of Montreal. The 2002 edition brought us the addition of more electronic and post-rock scenes in the shows, and ended by this very exclusive one-time trio performing together for our painful ears.
They played in a hockey arena transformed into a concert hall, in front of around a thousand people, maybe more. The performance has been very simple: on the stages, two tables : one at the left with diverse electronic components wired together, that will be used by the Pan Sonic duo (Mika Vianio et Hippo Vaisanen); the other one at the right has two laptops, and will be used by Masami Akita aka Merzbow. During the whole performance, all of them stayed very calm, focused on their duties, showing no emotion, very discrete manipulations, almost no hint on who does what. No interaction between them, nor with the audience.
In short: nothing to see, all to hear. Using all the available power to fill up the coliseum with that high impact noisy assault, eyes were useless. For my first experience of a live noise show, that could not be a better setup. This encounter was something quite unusual: Pan Sonic and Merzbow have very different approaches to electronic music, they don't even speak a common language apart from little bit of English. But they managed to discover how to converge in a common sound. Flowing between the asbtract electronic structures typical of the Pan Sonic and the high frequency, rich granulated textures of Merzbow, the combination morphed into a new kind of complex soundscape belonging to another dimension. The audience stayed paralyzed for the 70 minutes it lasted, minds being extracted from these heads by the intensity of the sounds to better get a grab on the beauty of these immense moments.
This is not my own recording. The french section of the CBC radio (Canadian national radio network) was present to record it in a much better way that I could do : straight from the console. They broadcasted the entire performance on the airwaves September 1st, 2002, so I ripped it from my receptor and did my best to make it sound as good as possible. I have decided to split the result into "parts" that I have choosen myself. Enjoy!
-neonyme
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