In late July, Pan-Pot dropped the mini-EP,The Other One. The two tracks featured on the release – ‘808 Nirvana’ and ‘Pina’ – are lifted from the duo’s forthcoming LP,The Other.
Berlin’s Tassilo Ippenberger and Thomas Benedix have been working together as Pan-Pot for more than a decade, and their debut full-length Pan-O-Rama came out in 2007. Since that time they’ve regularly released singles, EPs and remixes – as well as fulfilling DJ commitments all over the globe – but haven’t produced another long-player until now.
The Other was definitely designed to be played as an album – it ebbs and flows, taking in a variety of moods and emotional tones, and is augmented by a selection of guest vocalists. “We are using this album format to show our whole spectrum of music and what we like and our taste,” says Ippenberger. “I think this album format is a great format.”
Ippenberger and Benedix met at the turn of the 21st century when they were both enrolled in an audio engineering course. They’ve been engaged in a collaborative partnership ever since, and have developed a go-to working method for each time they enter the studio. However, they’re not averse to trialling new methods.
“In general we have a way of working – a workflow we more or less always use,” Ippenberger says. “But definitely, if you didn’t [try new things] it would get boring. We always try to find a different direction or a different idea for each track or remix, just to keep it interesting for ourselves. Obviously it’s always going to sound a little bit like us, because that’s something you can’t change and I think that’s OK.”
From a listener’s perspective, Pan-Pot’s music is a lot about feeling; it encourages movement and often evokes a sense of creeping darkness. While it’s easy to become enveloped in their productions, patience and meticulous fine-tuning play a huge role in the creative procedure.
“We are in love with detailed work and we spend a lot of time on it,” Ippenberger says. “The music we do – maybe it’s different with the album – is not super musical. Melodies and harmonies are not the focus, but the details and all this effects work and all this dark atmosphere. And we lose ourselves in it while we are doing it.
“Now it’s more efficient than it used to [be], but we spend like two weeks on a track, and that’s also the reason why we sometimes sound really monotone and minimal, because it has to work in a long period of time, in a long loop, and it’s not allowed to bother us. These darker sounds and darker atmospheres and these details make them more interesting and comfortable for us to listen over a long period of time.”
As opposed to harmony and melody, atmospheric details and effects are facets you’d associate with studio production. Conventionally, ‘songs’ have been considered things that are written first and then recorded later on. For producers, it often happens the other way around – tracks tend be built in the studio by expanding outwards from a root idea. On The Other, Pan-Pot looked to adopt a more traditional songwriting approach.
“We come from a very technical background. When we started working together whilst we were studying, we really produced in a way like experimenting with doing tracks. You’d go in the studio and you’d start creating something out of nothing. It’s all a big experiment. But now with [The Other] we started doing songs and really focused on writing pieces, on writing lyrics and on writing hook lines and on writing the chorus.
“In the past we only worked in an experimental way, in this kind of ‘producer’ way, and we were both interested in doing something else. We wanted to do something else with our name and in this album context and we said, ‘We want to do songs, we want to do ambient stuff, we want to write music, we want to work with musicians,’ and stuff like that.”
The Other offers a more expansive depiction of Pan-Pot’s capabilities than their recent singles, but the pair’s techno origins haven’t been swept to the side. The electronic music sphere is always changing, and new trends pop up all the time. You can’t deny a number of less interesting trends have emerged in recent years, but a lot of really great music continues to come out of the ever-evolving field of expression.
“We’ve always been somehow influenced by other artists, and especially out of the genre, because you always had people who were really bringing things forward,” says Ippenberger. “Especially right now, you have this term ‘EDM’ and you have all this shit EDM stuff, but you also have interesting EDM stuff. We both really like dubstep, like proper dubstep. From these guys… they are so young and so musically forward-thinking, but also technically forward-thinking. If you see these guys working with synthesisers, like Massive or Spectrum, it’s mind-blowing to see how fast they come to a certain point.
“I think you should always be interested in what’s going on. It’s always a question of taste, but in the end people who work hard, people who are talented and people who reach goals because they deserve it – why should I be bitter about that?”
Pan-Pot’sThe Other is out Friday September 25 through Second State. Catch them at The Arthouse on Saturday September 12.
