Very pleased to hear the latest report from Paul Baran, the Scots composer / musician who impressed us mightily with two solo records, Panoptic (2009) and The Other (2014). More recently he appeared with Gordon Kennedy as The Cray Twins, who made The Pier and The Company of Architects.
Baran is back today solo with Pan Global Riot (FANG BOMB FB030), and it’s a generous double-disc set of music featuring a large number of collaborators and contributors, including Gordon Kennedy who adds keyboards, processing, and is credited as co-producer. Also here are assorted talented free improvisers – Franz Hautzinger, Tony Bevan, Jim McEwen – and tech geniuses credited with programming, electronics, and processing, such as Andrew Leslie Hooker, Adam Linson, Alan Bryden and others. What I’ve enjoyed most about Baran’s work since 2009 is that he’s very engaged with politics and society, quite prescient and well-informed about what’s going on the world (more than me, certainly), and can be very critical about it, while also creating soundscapes that are full of desolate and chilling visions, creating a dismal mood without even naming anything specific about the state of current affairs in the 21st century. That said, there’s plenty of hot topics on offer in Pan Global Riot – including Donald Trump, the Covid pandemic, terrorist bombings, the perils of social media and IT, and a track called ‘Emergency Britain’ which speaks for itself.
Only occasionally will Baran resort to sampling voices from the TV or radio to help cement his messages into place. On the opening track ‘Trumphead’, for instance, he does it with the voice of Donald Trump himself, and Baran is unequivocal in his attack – he clearly sees Trump as a monster, and transforms the voice into that of an evil ogre, cutting up the dialogue to make plain that this former US president, life-long capitalist exploiter and trouble-maker is only interested in securing his own power and pursuing naked self-interest. From there on the remainder of the album is a grim and bracing survey of the world – Baran doesn’t like what he sees, finding much despair in our current climate and accurately predicting greater concerns to come in the future. The first disc contains a lot of the “exciting” music and sounds, and could almost be mistaken for a suite of upbeat electronica where it not for the darker meanings hidden within. Paul Baran has opted to press the “funk” switch for some of his concoctions here, sourcing musicians who are capable of playing it and enriching his music with dance beats as needed – for instance on ‘The Politics of Distraction’. The irony here is that it’s a snapshot of the gaslighting UK government and their media games, and in this context the music presents it all as a joyless dance towards oblivion.
Disc one also contains plenty of genre-crossing – “an ignorer of boundaries” is how the press release describes Baran – with experiments in noise, electro-acoustic bleakery, techno, electropop, sampling, and undefinable episodes making great use of discordant, layered synths and ghastly keening voices. Although we’ve heard one too many pandemic albums here at TSP, ‘Covid and Crow’ is undoubtedly one of the more successful entries – harrowing, sharp, emotional. The accumulative effect of disc one is to pass on the very real sense that all is not well in the world – a sense that becomes more acute as we near the end of the disc. But there’s worse to come; most of the truly pessimistic moments are on the second disc, where the abiding mood is just one of great sadness – for instance the desolate vistas of ‘Mandlestam (Speak Truth to Power)’, or the heartbreaking mood of ‘English Pastoral’, which samples evidence from the UK Covid enquiry on top of a plaintive piano melody. ‘Zero-Sum Game’ is an unblinking stare at modern warfare, terrorism and home-made bombs, and the collage of TV / advertising voices strongly suggests chaos, forces on the verge of spinning out of control; and computers aren’t helping, in fact they are part of the problem. There’s also China ‘For Ai Weiwei)’, dedicated to a contemporary activist in that country, and serving up a very mixed-message, ironic, and astringent portrait with its mix of musical styles and spoken word interludes.
Meanwhile, the cover art of this six-panel digipak presents us with information about the latest developments in Taser weapon technology, and the use of sonic attacks with radio microwaves that cause damage to brain tissue. If that’s not paranoid enough for ya, there’s the cover image which probably depicts a policeman in riot gear, but my takeaway is the smoke from his tear gas grenade – it suggests there’s an unwelcome cloud of poison that’s about to envelop him. It’s already obliterated three-quarters of the picture, and the rest of the world may be next. There’s such clear-headed vision in Baran’s forecasts that it’s enough to convince me once again that artists, not politicians or tech giants or big business concerns, should be in charge of running the world – though there’s zero chance of that happening in our lifetime, mainly because “they” know how much of a threat art truly is to the intolerable status quo. Perhaps it’s just the duty of the responsible artist to oppose and attack wherever possible. This has probably been Baran’s agenda as an artist since day one; with this release, we can safely say “mission accomplished”. From 28 February 2023.