Stephanie Pan / Ensemble Klang
The Art Of Doing Nothing: A Feminist Manifesto
NETHERLANDS ENSEMBLE KLANG RECORDS #17 CD (2024)
Semi-conceptual voice-based art music, performed with the help of a small contemporary ensemble.
The impressive vocal skills of this American singer-composer-performance artist are dazzling for sure, but she’s reined herself in a bit since the excesses of her 2018 “robot dog” piece, which stood on the cusp of saying something useful about modern technology. Here the plan is to provide a guide to modern living, an instruction manual of sorts; she regards the modern world as “chaotic”, not without good cause, and her spoken-sung imprecations here might be read as a form of survivalist literature, as we attempt to “navigate choice”. Stephanie Pan achieves this by alternating between memorable and portable didactic phrases, such as “question your motivations….weigh all options”, and sharp imagist poetry, for instance as on ‘I Am A Lizard’. As to the latter motif, for sure she’s not attempting to follow the lineage of Jim Morrison; his masculinist lizard-king thing was assertive phallocentrism at its early 1970s peak, while the lizard of Stephanie Pan is an agile, quick-thinking reptile darting freely between the interstices that might seek to confine it.
More to the point, Pan pushes her feminist agenda to the forefront, valuing skillsets such as intuition and emotions as the basis of the tools we must use to understand and shape our lives. In this framework, it’s even OK to be vulnerable and afraid; we can embrace the uncertainty and feel equipped to go forward, even when we don’t know what’s around the next corner. In this context, I suppose “Doing Nothing” doesn’t refer to a sense of despondency or apathy in the face of a futile struggle; it might have more to do with biding your time, not interfering, and simply waiting to see if something is going to become a problem before sticking your oar in. The photo of the stage version of this piece does in fact show two performers simply sitting on a leather couch, perhaps providing a visual counterpart to one of the object lessons.
Ensemble Klang play the musical backdrops composed by Pan, doing much to enhance the mood and meanings with their synths, saxes, percussion, guitars and trombone, underscoring the texts in a sympathetic manner. But it’s 100% her own personal vision, and she not only plays synth and drum machine on the set, she also co-produced and mixed the record. With some of these vocal gymnastics, one’s tempted to liken her to a futuristic Yma Sumac, but she’s closer to being a refitted version of Laurie Anderson, and every bit as incisive. Very original and useful work. From 10th June 2024.