When I posted about Pan Daijing's album Jade last year, I mentioned that it was her leap towards more intimate composition writing, a break from bombastic performances at art galleries she had gotten fluent in. And now, only several months later, we can get familiar with those massive works she needed to get away from, thanks to the album called Tissues.
The Chinese artist based in Berlin performed "an opera of five acts" at Tate Modern in London back in 2019, and now we can admire its grandeur and experimental flavour. The event made use of "conventions of opera and tragedy to present a searing representation of the embattled human psyche in space and time." As we all know already, Pan Daijing uses a lot of impressive vocals, but here the opera-like, very theatrical but also not very informative lyrics-wise are utterly dominant. Or maybe not so meaningless? The libretto is said to be written in a mix of traditional and modern Chinese so perhaps there's more in the voices then I think. But for sure, there's tons of emotions communicated in extremely direct way, inviting the audience to feel all sorts of feeling from the whole spectrum - from melancholic calm to invigorating grandeur and this is thanks to the cast of twelve dancers and opera singers who perform it together with Pan Daijing.
But this is as far from a traditionally defined opera as possible. The artist based her work on industrial noise that, although gives space to the vocal quite often, really is there to create the soundscape. It's not a coincidence that the artist was my Ambient/Neoclassical act of last year as her music skills are as impressive as they are diverse.
Tissues costs 7.5 EUR.
Check: Part Two - A Found Lament
Country: China/Germany
Genre: noise opera
