5. Pan SonicA

I saw Pan Sonic play quite a lot of times and it was always a visceral affair. They would have a table of seemingly DIY boxes, certainly nothing I recognised from a distance, and I was still very much learning ways that people can do this thing live so I always had a look at what was getting brought to shows. A few times I saw them they had an old oscilloscope patched to the desk output for visuals. For most bands this would be just a fairly boring staticy green screen as the scope looked for anything to lock into in the complex spectrum of sounds in a song, but for Pan Sonic you got animated wave shapes – simple, raw waves. Often the drums were clicks, filtered to do the job of drums. It was a very primitive palette. Before I ever saw them live I could hear this rawness in the recordings. There were no clever tricks here, no ‘production’; it was more like monitoring pure electricity than listening to an instrument.