How Panchiko Made Me Fall For Death Metal
The greatest thing about art is creativity. I like to judge art by how much it can promise me: is the potential behind this idea impressive? Is the execution of this creative endeavor worthwhile? Do I just dig where it’s trying to go? If the answer to the above questions is yes, then rest assured, I like it. Or, more pretentiously, I get it.
The greatest thing about music is that it’s art, so the same holds for anything I listen to. I don’t think I’d ever be able to be a music critic because I can’t tell whether a form of art is bad per se, just that I don’t get it. The reasons could be many. I don’t relate to how it makes me feel, I don’t see what it’s trying to do, the meaning is lost on me, and so on. There’s a lot of music that I would love to love, but simply don’t. By the same token, there’s a lot of music that I would love to hate, but simply don’t. Then, there’s the music that I end up loving at first, but over time find myself stupendously unimpressed by. It ceases to be something I’m intrigued by, the majestic promises behind the scope evaporate after every listen, and I find myself admiring an aural portrait of a part of my life I’ve since lost interest or appeal for.
This is not what happened between me and Panchiko’s D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L, but it is what happens to me in relationships, and because I’m dating again, I’ve somehow come across this mysterious album and began to wonder: why is it that I’m drawn to promise and not payoff? Why is that the benefit of the doubt is more captivating than the goodness of the heart? Why do I like the rotten, hazy idea behind sound — and love, for that matter — and not a pristine, conventionally-produced resolution?
Join me for this special edition of Sex and the CD where we find out why all girls like bad boys, and why everyone loved the rotten version of D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L (oh, how annoying that is to type, so, all due respect to artistic intent, we’ll stick to Deathmetal from here on out).
Part One: It Began in OXFAM (and /mu/ )
Our story begins in a dimly lit, rundown thrift store in Nottingham, United Kingdom. To be honest, I have no idea if the store was actually dim lit or run down, but with the recent turn of events, I have to picture it with a certain level of fitting grittiness. If you’re not familiar with an OXFAM Shop, think about it as a shoppable Salvation Army, or a Fairtrade Goodwill. The idea is you can buy goods — typically clothes, but all sorts of hipster stuff goes nowadays, thanks to Urban Outfitters having inspired a generation — and the profit goes to a number of charity organizations focusing on the alleviation of global poverty. We can only speculate as to when the story allegedly begins in the ever-forgotten outside world, but we do have a date for the online ordeal. The day is July 21, 2016. An anonymous user posts the picture of a white album with an anime girl drawn on the cover, PANCHIKO is spelled in all caps black block letters and Deathmetal is stylized in simple Arial at the bottom. I have made it my personal mission in life to avoid anyone having to visit the internet wasteland that is 4chan, so you can find a transcript of the original posting below (censored for your and my discretion):
hey hey
I picked this up because it looked interesting
I wasn’t able to find any references to it, online, whatsoever. even with super obscure bands, you might expect to find some an old myspace page or mention in some forum.
does anybody recognise the album?
I half expected it to be noise pop or some vapourwave w*****y. listening to it, now, track 1 is like hella lo fi shoegaze with noise panning back and forth.
this isn’t some viral marketing bulls**t. I’m just curious if anyone can shed some light on it and I’m slightly excited by the prospect of owning a rare album
The original thread didn’t spark an exorbitant level of curiosity, originally. In typical 4chan fashion, eloquent users bullied our defensive protagonist into ripping and uploading the recording of the album online, which they were able to do with a little effort into tech savvy. The original poster quickly disappeared and deleted the original images of the record sleeve, but this first exchange — like everything else, on the internet — is still archived. It was through this archive that the quest to find Panchiko became the stuff of legends for years to come. Users who found the thread went on to post the audio rip of the record on Youtube, where the original upload gained traction very quickly.
Now, it may seem hypocritical of me to condemn 4chan’s board /mu/, which to be fair, is one of the site’s least offensive forums, considering how I found this record in the first place. /mu/, which stands for music, is where obscure cacophony aficionados round up to discuss some of the most peculiar records to date. But it’s not really the content that makes /mu/. There are hidden gems here and there, but the end-of-the-year lists don’t seem to differ too heavily from something you might find amongst Anthony Fantano’s recommendations. It’s the manner through which these users are completely committed to cataloguing and illustrating the journey through sound that makes this music accessible. Some of the most interesting /mu/ artifacts are these fascinating collections of niche infographics. From ‘How to Get Into Jazz’ to a ‘Complete Guide to Swans’ and ‘The Best Vaporwave of 2014,’ there are hundreds, if not thousands of tracks that users have made it their mission to lead others onto. /mu/ is not a community of critics. It’s a community of outsiders, who champion underdogs for their own ritualistic catharsis. I know philosophizing 4chan is not doing me any favors, but if I were to simply post an infographic without context I might be confused for an actual user. We established I’m a hypocrite, so I want to make it clear: I lurk from afar. I lurked my way into finding this.
As I was familiar with the dreamiest and most psychedelic of these offerings, I felt it fitting to welcome the new decade by challenging myself to give other albums a chance to become favorites.I played a sophisticated game of chance. I wanted to start everyday by meeting a new record; after loading the image on my iPhone, I’d wave my finger around like a magic wand for a few seconds, without looking down at the screen, before landing it close enough to an album, effectively pointing myself to a new sound.
One of my earliest experiences forced me to spend the afternoon in the company of Nico’s Marble Index. In many ways, it was interesting. I do intend to write about the endurance I had to rely on, when I realized that proto-goth dissonant avant-folk was something I did not get at all. Much like the games of chance we play when deciding to download a trendy dating app and letting some mysterious algorithmic force pick out a potential partner, my Marble Index soiree was an awkward first date: Nico droned on, I didn’t know what to say, the minutes felt like hours. The conversation that was supposed to ensue between me and inspiration never surged, and I didn’t know what exactly I was being promised, if anything at all. I wanted to go home to a much more comfortable brand of noise, something auditory and conversational, but not any less abrasive. Lucky for me, rebounding with the familiar White Light/White Heat was just another finger wand wave away. I disappeared from Nico the same way I did from my last three blind dates: swiftly cutting communication, and never bothering with it — or them — again. The truth is that this is a very real risk when you judge a partner by a few lines on the dating profile, and an album by its genre tags on Rate Your Music. On the screen everything looks perfect. The somber, sexy look in their eye; the interesting potential conversations regarding the experimental sensibilities you both share; a potential fondness for the work of John Cale… but, when the time comes to spend time together, you don’t mesh. You don’t gel. After all, you can’t force a spark that isn’t there. And it needs to be there for art and love’s sake.
When I was evaluating just what type of date I was going get with Panchiko, I felt less intimidated. Several of the original /mu/ posters were quite generous. From “it’s a masterpiece” to “it’s pretty cool. I definitely felt some feels,” and even digital sonic literary scapes along that described the sound as:
Bitrushed noise over a dude singing with a guitar, some synths, a breakbeat enterred, some subtle vocal sample in the background, wild vinyl crackle appears.
The love continued to make me feel quite excited, the better the feedback and the giddier I felt. “I love obscure stuff like this and its the reason i still come on this board” made me giggle. “This is actually pretty good, really noisy and chill, honestly been looking for s**t like this,” could this be the one? There was even that subtle hint of doubt that made everything feel all the more positive: “it was pretty good, I thought the fourth track would drag on for too long but it turned out to be a really pleasant track.” Pretty pleasant? In 2020’s COVID-19 infested lovescape, this was something to be admired! By the time I saw, someone commenting “looks interesting, can’t wait to hear it” I was sold. It was time to give Panchiko a chance to impress me. Never mind the red flags of dejected downers that echoed that “It sounds pretty s**t but then again it’s lo-fi,” or “that was horrible, it sounds like something someone who visits mu would make.” One shallow human even admitted to the worst possible dating fallacy while judging this promising piece of music, remarking that “the songs beneath are dull to me. I only like the presentation.” Ouch. But, I’m more complex. I wasn’t going to be deterred by the potential imperfection. And, at the end of an intoxicating, curiosity-filled first, spontaneous listen, I was infatuated. Like this poster, who kept it simple, I contemplated existence with a simple thought:
isnt it beautiful? what a life.
Part Two: Dating D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L
Full disclosure, I wasn’t trendy enough to be part of the original record discovery operation four years ago. I guess I was too busy celebrating the epic reunion of Lush and hosting a radio show at 3 AM to frolic amidst the meadows of /mu/. My first time with Panchiko wouldn’t come until a finger-wand-wave in mid-2020. I scanned enough online to know what I was getting myself into — some light pre-date stalking, if you will — and I found out about the mysterious origins of the record before my first listen. In order to simulate authenticity, like a good blind date would, I made myself go for the rotten, audio damaged versions.
I immediately understood the hype. A two-second languid string sample from the Dr. Strangelove Theme plays, repeatedly bitcrushed under crunchy layers of fuzz-filled airy MP3 rot that tears the sound away from earth and into heaven. It was love at first sight. Ten seconds in, a delicate, timid arpeggio tickles through a guitar — something of a bold move at the time, one that clues us into Panchiko’s penchant for electro-guitar music. It was this layering of all sorts that made for the intriguing instrumentals of the title track. Many artists that dictated the UK alternative rock scene found themselves doing so by being avid Radiohead fans, who happened to turn a computer on while producing their latest Britpop anthem. But many others remain hidden gems. Simian’s 2002 EP Watch It Glow, in particular, does the rhythm section justice by infusing psychedelic ballads with appetizing garage-inspired drum fills. I can’t even tell you how many times Spotify’s automated playlists attempted to set me up with Grandaddy’s Under the Western Freeway as a result of my angsty romps with the OK Computer reissue of 2017. It’s hard not to hear the reference to the title track in Death Metal, though I’m a bigger advocate for the more casual, slackery Go Progress Chrome. The ‘electroguitar sound’ has since become the topic of a lot of emotional debate over the years. It’s pretty funny.
So, great, Deathmetal was reflective, complex, brooding and mysterious — just my type. But, could our conversations really hold up? Was she beauty and the brains, or was I dealing with a butt-er-bass?
One of the most conspiratorial insights into Deathmetal is that, compared to the main vocals, the stuttering sample splashed in the bridge — taken from the Sega Saturn video game Burning Rangers — warning users to “don’t play the track with a regular CD player,” is exceptionally free of the rotted muff-p3. I’m not here to argue with that. Maybe, love makes me blind. Maybe, the frequency is low enough for it to be unaffected by the rot. I won’t pretend to know anything about audio engineering. What I can tell you is that this simple line, inserted with a woeful irony of meta appeal, is an example of why Deathmetal remains unforgettable. The bleak emotion, the fatefulness of the everyday, the fact that the band themselves took a second to say “you’re not supposed to hear this like a normal thing,” some may call it pretentious not-like-other-girls-syndrome, but I liken it back to its time as a witty quip that, in 2000, would have been at least a little clever. Maybe, I’m making excuses.
Many do think that the vocals are the weakest part of this little LP. They are attempting the harmonious depression gymnastics of aural dread of Thom Yorke, but due to the very apparent youthfulness and modest range, our mysterious singer ends up sounding more Emo than Alt. Still, the thematic resonance in the track is loud and bold. The entire song refers to a woman, an unpleasant (read: “harpy”) one, but like the instrumental, there seems to be more than meets the eye. She seems to be mentally ill — there are hints to her taking meds, and our singer is “educating someone who is mental.” This bizarre idealization of the insane is a little ahead of its time, if you ask me. We would have to wait four more years for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and 500 Days of Summer. Even Girl. Interrupted, which deals more openly with mental illness, was still fresh on our minds. The fact that the record appears to be self-aware of its own insane mysticism is more haunting than an outdated console sample, but that just might be reading into mixed signals.
The song evaporates into cacophonous insanity, which makes it just that more appealing to a noise fiend like me, and the perfect transition for what ends up being my least favorite track, Stabilisers for Big Boys. The song has an eruption of vaguely garage punk chaos that sounds like what would happen if the breaks from Just were injected into Paranoid Android (hint: Electioneering is what happens, apparently). There’s this dreamy interlude on the chorus, but the aggression of the lyrics is showing me a side of Panchiko I have not met yet. Once again, the protagonist is a young — I guess? — woman, with a soft laughter that makes her suspiciously generic and weirdly intimidating. She seems so cool, in fact, to trigger some bizarre desires that seem to come straight from the soul of the id itself (and potentially were the real inspiration behind Fifty Shades of Gray)…
I want to unlock the door / and catch you on all fours / I want to break you like glass / I want to do it with class / I want to kiss like a girl / I want to f**k up your world
Now that we’ve finally made it past the dirty talk, we can go back to the sweetness. I will say the third track, Laputa, has a distinctly No Surprises meets Let Down vibe. It’s very sparkly and jangly, but in that melancholic and cloudy way. The fact that it’s shy of three minutes in length is even more of a testament to its fleeting beauty. It’s a memory. And, apparently, a reference to a studio Ghibli film I do not know much about. I should not be the authority when it comes to anime references in soundtracks… at all. Coming from the romance language school, I separated the La from Puta in my head for hilariously unfortunate mental results. It’s sweet and saccharine, and I suppose it could make for a great Anime Youtube Reviewer jingle these days. The destructive rot will prevent any copyright detection bot to go haywire.
The original rip of the Deathmetal EP concludes with The Eyes of Ibad. If Panchiko was close to losing me with its wild side, and boring me with its sugary one, here I’m thrown right back into loveland. The song opens with the most noticeable rot yet, muff echoing around a hypnotic lo-fi drum loop that builds slowly and ominously. The vocals bounce around with a pretty intense delay that I find myself weirdly intrigued by. The electric guitar strums along in that trip-hop way that makes this record so interesting — and once again, mysteriously unaffected by decay. And, before you remind me, yes, I do know this was a Dune reference. Now, that is. Like any relationships, sometimes you need to pretend you’re in the sci-fi in-the-know to look cool, and Deathmetal is no different. In the novel — whose film we might not end up seeing on the big screen, after all, by the way — the Eyes of Ibad are the blue-tinged ones you end up with after becoming addicted to the coveted intergalactic smart drug of the universe, spice. Like the title track, this one erupts in a cacophony of bouncy synths — possibly, my type, it seems — but not before our mysterious vocalist croons, “So, how high must I go? / Before I know / That it’s too far to fall?” There’s a degree of danger in the closer. We’re somehow aware getting caught up in the damaged, surreal world of Deathmetal can be intoxicating. Like all relationships, this is the moment where you have to decide to be all in. Even though you might know exactly what you’re getting yourself into…
Part Three: The Honeymoon Phase
Against all better judgement, as per usual, I’ve decided to go pretty high. After barely one date with Deathmetal, I knew we’d hit it off and I was ready for more. Sure, in the world of music listening, the more is a completely figurative term because the songs technically stay the same. Is it delusional of me to image I was hearing something new with every listen? An extra crunch of delay here and there, an escaped whispered vocal lost in the fuzz, a suffocated synth. Every time I fired up what amounts to fifteen minutes of chaotic sound, I was on a high. I never got tired or sick of the mystery. In fact, it was the rot that kept me intrigued, that helped me see and hear things that maybe weren’t really there, just because I didn’t hear them not there in the first place. Deathmetal was the perfect EP. Intriguing, lively, intellectual, elusive, and just the right amount of messed up. An invitation to adventure that transcended my headphones, and made me realize I was getting very close to hating it forever.
A lot of people don’t understand why I see so much of Brian Wilson’s Smile in this short EP. To be fair, that project deserves its own 35,000 word essay no one will read, but hear me out for a brief — who are we kidding — second. What was Smile if not a myth? An unfinished pastiche of sounds and emotions captured on tape, sparsely filling in the space of time we call sound? Back in 2004, when we finally answered this question, did we really? Many notorious names in criticism came forward praising the momentous fit that is revisiting a long-lost, potentially cursed relationship and attempting to put all the pieces of it back together. They got it. It was good. There’s one thing to be said about EPs that exist in this cocoon of temporary ambiguity: the nostalgia acid bath ends up coloring most of our sensibilities. Smile was good for 2004 and for 1967. Was Deathmetal good for 2016 the same way that it had been for whatever year it was from? To many romantics like me, who were happily honeymooning with mystery, it was better. It had gone unnoticed, and no one bothered to put it back together until now. In fact, it’d faced the damage of time without going by unscathed. It was a damaged record we could all fix. Dare I say, the perfect partner?
The presence of the rot itself is a controversial subject, even in 2021. A lot /mu/ defenders swear it’s too pristine and complex to be real. This was the secret to Panchiko’s planted viral marketing. Yet others think otherwise. “The songs themselves sound great, but you can’t tell me the static’s supposed to be there,” most pro-rotters stand by this sentiment. I don’t want this to turn into a conspiracy theory overview on Panchiko — trust me, there’s plenty of material online that eloquently investigates MP3 rot, made by people who actually know about audio engineering in the same way I know about forming imaginary relationships with twenty-year-old lost EPs. All I will tell you is that CD Rot has a distinct sound, and Deathmetal doesn’t seem immune to it.
I fell for Deathmetal. I ate up the mysterious magical world of love, all of the old sound of sweet strings in a new package. I flirted with violence and succumbed to its shrieks. I believed sugary refrains and promises that were too good to be true, lost in time. And by the end of it, my eyes and my heart were blue in blue.
Part Four: Defining the Relationship
As I navigate the complex sociopolitics of entering a relationship with a piece of music, a question arises. What is this album without the rot? And, had anyone managed to unveil it? Coincidentally enough, yes, and this had only happened a few months before my series of delusional events.
In 2016, Panchiko’s magnum opus had made quite the impression on /mu/, an impression that stood the test of time. In desperate attempts to trace the original band behind the anime, the rip was uploaded to Youtube and listed on the Rate Your Music database — the online music Disneyland of the Pitchfork anti-reddit crew. While the original /mu/ poster disappeared as quickly as he’d originally posted, the community fascinated with Deathmetal persisted and joined forces in order to finally uncover this mystery. Anonymous users got together on a Discord server, the twenty-first century next best way to meet friends after R/insertcityhere_meetups, and endless months of Facebook scouring after found a man by the name of Owain.
I woke up one day, […] and ping — there’s a message on a defunct Facebook page of mine, with some music, that I hadn’t updated in nine years: ‘Hello, you’ll probably never read this, but are you the lead singer of Panchiko?’
He was. As he later told Bandcamp’s Zoe Camp. Reliving a pleasant experience, a whirlwind romance of all sorts wasn’t enough for the internet. Addiction calls for refuel, and we were running low on gasoline. It was time to go straight to the source: the real truth behind the layers of distortion is the only thing that can really tell us whether this union will last beyond a fling.
Shortly after Owain was found, we found out that he was still in touch with two of the members behind the original Panchiko lineup. One of them was Andy, now an actual audio engineer and the gatekeeper of the elusive rotless Deathmetal master. As soon as his identity was revealed, the requests for a clean mix began pouring in.
Miraculously enough, “friends and family” desperately wanted for our ship to be canon. And Andy was closer than ever to finally make this official.
Despite Andy’s best efforts, however, the seed had already been planted for our jealous, chronically-single hater friends to root against us. An original /mu/ poster in the very first thread hinted at this skeptical take with one clever post.
It’s almost like OP used a random artwork he found around to push his shitty album to everyone else.
It’s a little sad to admit this is how I feel about 2020 swiping. What lies behind a happy face? An attractive selfie is a conceited sign of confidence that tells us that you know you’re hot and we’re not worthy. A group picture is a confusing sign of social anxiety. A photo of your pet is a sure fire why to know you’re hideous. Don’t even get me started on the talking torso with abs screaming so loud we know there might as well not be a head attached, for all intents and purposes are purely sexual in nature. Or the doomer memester, whose only potential for success would be somehow landing a Fuckjerry internship — which no one wants anymore, anyway. It’s a mess. But so was Deathmetal. And whose to say this one wasn’t about to bound to work out, anyway? Even when we meet our face, our friend, our pet owner, our talking torso, and even our jaded Gen-Xer, we don’t believe what’s clearly there. We think they were the ones putting up a front, hiding behind their flesh — or their rot — when, in fact, we’re the ones to dumb to see what’s actually going on. In an interview with Corduroy Threads’ Julian Rioux, Owain later says of this: “It seems like the more we provide; the more some folks think it is all a hoax.”
Andy didn’t disagree.
The whole experience has allowed us to meet some lovely people on the Discord server but also opened my eyes to absolutely abhorrent, completely unjustified levels of weird abuse by what seems like some pretty disturbed kids.
It’s a numbers game, plenty of fish in the sea, you gotta find your needle in the haystakck… volume of demand is key to survive when you’re looking for love online. You have to keep your options open, your conversations incessant, your determination up there to succeed.
And were we the next best thing after determined. We were desperate.
Part Five: Hitting a Rough Patch (of Grass)
So, what makes the relationship work out? Some may say it’s a matter of destiny, the will of God himself. In this case, they were not too far off, seeing as it was a user known as “Zod” who finally got through to the band. “The Discord server have been so supportive […] I work as a mastering engineer so I couldn’t resist trying to restore and remaster everything,” Andy admitted, although singer Owain didn’t really feel the same way, “I originally was not keen on it being found and remastered, it sounded cool and had this interesting story.”
What changed?
“ I realised though it’s not mine/Panchiko’s to keep, the music had resonated with a number of people, it was theirs more than it was mine/Panchiko’s and it had found its own way into their lives.”
Unbelievable as it may be, when you meet someone, the dichotomy between your experience of them and their experience of you reflected back creates a whole other creature. In astrology, my second love after music, there are two ways to analyze compatibility between two people — and none of them involves sketchy apps or online barometers with outdated flash animations. One of them is a Synastry chart, a superimposition of the birth charts of two people that highlights resulting aspects and key interactions. The second, far more interesting method is a Composite. A Composite chart averages the birth charts of two people to create a completely new chart — one of the relationship itself. This latent personification of the connection gives us an idea what the product of our fusion will be, but it would be impossible to calculate without knowing even a little bit about our potential partner. Are we ready to disclose how delusional and disturbed we really are, and ask for a birthdate?
There’s always some real risk to know the backstory of the object of our infatuation. A sense of mysticism fades. And just as Andy was busy physically restoring the Panchiko masters, we got to piece together, even by mere exercise of the imagination, the real origin story of the record.
It turns out to have been recorded around 1998. Owain says they were “just four childhood friends working with cheap equipment, no money, no label, and certainly no promo.” They “started playing covers in local pubs that were lenient […] Battle of The Bands at a place called ‘Berlins’ in Nottingham and when they found out that [they] were underage [they] got disqualified.” Endearing and precocious, just my type. While John, one of the members of Panchiko, has avoided being found to this day, we did meet a third musician by the name of Shaun, a classical guitar making student who worked part time and would meet Owain and Andy in the weekends, and who also doesn’t have fond memories of Battle of the Bands, recalling that “there was another [one] where there were only three people in the audience and they were there to support the other band.” How adorable! So far, so good, right?
“We would fit in recording and writing around […] college, practicing at weekends […] in lovely rural Lincolnshire […] I was a little hung over on some of the takes on both EP’s [while recording]. I think John helped me with some of the lyrics on Kicking Cars one Friday in the pub, and after a few, maybe some cars were kicked.” — Owain
Both EPs? What is this, some kind of joke? Was there a second record? Did the love of my life lead a whole other existence I had never even known about? A good relationship is based on trust! Better late than never, I guess. And we’ll get to that second EP, in a second.
While Andy “sat around watching comedy on the tele and writing songs […] that sampled Father Ted and History Today from Newman and Baddiel” Owain added his own brand of love for Radiohead and Super Furry Animals — the latter friends that I have only come to meet recently, thanks to Panchiko themselves. Eventually, the two of them got to work on a “keyboard called the DJX, and it was this 200-pound instrument that had two seconds of sample memory. So, you had two seconds to sample.” After a year, they produced a second three-song EP called Kicking Cars. By this point Owain owned “a fun little Yamaha sampler and a KORG Ms2000 […] that changed the sound a bit.”
By now, I could hear the glass shattering. Not only was there a second EP, but there was a whole different sound. I listened to the tracks. CUT is another angsty twirling synth-ballad that references Blade Runner, with an eerie delay that sounds a little dated. Sodium Chloride is weirdly acoustic, and sounds like a cautiously optimistic track you’d play on a lukewarm early morning road trip you’re not caffeinated enough to undertake, containing a sample of James Galway’s Song of the Seashell (Sakuragai No Uta). Kicking Cars is Panchiko’s Street Spirit Fade Out. It was interesting choice for them to release their The Bends after their OK Computer, but its failure is a dire reminder on just how important the transition between two records is.
There was never really any master plan for the releases […]We gave the CDs to friends, a few got sent out to reviewers […] We received a reply from a label called Fierce Panda and I was blown away.
The one that got away, Fierce Panda, is credited with major early releases from former alt giants like Keane, Death Cab for Cutie, and yes, even the ex you now hate, Coldplay. No, it didn’t sign Panchiko, but they got it. “We just didn’t really have the means to gig in London at the time and no A&R would travel to Nottingham to see one band” says Owain. Out of the few reviews they’d get, some would suggest them to “sack the singer,” much to his chagrin. With only thirty records pressed and distributed here and there, the four friends decided to call it quits, with all but Andy abandoning music full-time altogether. Owain is a tree surgeon and teacher who “also worked at a comic shop for a while and went to college/uni. [He] made electronic instrumental music for a while, created audio reactive visuals as well as VJing.”
It doesn’t come as that much of a surprise that the band was somewhat reluctant to return to their music. Their formative relationship with music is highly personal and even quite niche, considering the material they referenced in their songs. I for a fact, never really find myself returning to former partners once that link has been severed. But, Andy’s eagerness to remaster the record and Owain’s desire to play along with the release of even more b-sides in 2020 was enough to ignite more suspicion of this whole ordeal being one big marketing ploy. To this, Owain replies:
To the generally skeptical but reasoned thinker, I respect that. You got to think for yourself and I encourage you to do so. Make up your own mind. Thing is, it is real. I lived it.
Just a few months before my fateful finger-wand wave, the internet finally got to fix the band and reveal the true Panchiko Deathmetal masters.
Part Six: ’Til “Deathmetal” Do Us Part
Eventually, I also gave in and allowed myself to listen to the remastered tracks. I remember feeling a sort of trepidation at the thought of hearing the samples clearly, the vocals intelligibly and the instrumentation mixing with accessible clarity. What else was there that I didn’t catch before?
Deathmetal, the title track, sans rot, remains a collage of sounds. In its lucid state, the song is an invitation into idiosyncrasy, attempting to craft a blend of different, quirky sounds with fitting hyperbole. “A lot of people were listening to nu-metal, so maybe it was a reaction to that music” he says. Stabilisers for Big Boys is a song that was originally doctored enough not to suffer tremendously from the lack of rot. The only issue is that the song tries to cut like a knife, but without the extra edginess of the rot, it’s a little hard for it to hit sharply enough.
Laputa rotless, on the other hand, is still very much enough to raise my blood sugar to the skies, but has a more interesting depth with a now-audible bass. According to Owain, “Laputa is all about yearning for something you thought was lost and you would never see again.” It was, indeed, inspired by the movie which he’d seen during childhood and since taken on a “mythical status” that made him wonder if he’d actually dreamt an animated treasure. Luckily, one day he “picked up the soundtrack in a comic shop in Nottingham called Page 45, in 1999” and confirmed its existence. Eyes of Ibad was another piece inspired by fiction that made Owain question his own taste, and sanity. “I guess what I wrote about was weird, I would reference science fiction…” he said. Without the magic of the rot, once again, something is a little more obvious, less stifled. The famous whispered portion that takes place three fourths of the way retains the canned vocals, making me wonder what the point of removing the rot even is in the first place.
Panchiko members seem to agree and prefer the rotten versions, but I regret to inform all muff-lovers that, apparently, we’re in the minority. I say apparently because the rotten records were enough to captivate and mobilize a whole community of internet music nerds, and as nice as the cleaner versions are, I struggle to think they’d have the same impact. And so, I can’t help but wonder: is idealized mystery the secret to attraction? Seeing someone with a vague, but aesthetically pleasing, distortion that allows us to project whatever it is we want to see and hear? Is that the only way we can manage to stay interested and intrigued to open ourselves to love in an age where we assume everything to be instant?
I initially set out to write this essay with the intention of proving that that the answer to the above questions is yes. That we must make a choice to either accept Panchiko for who they are now that we see and hear a different version of them, or attempt to create a narrative that molds them into what we thought they could have been, and assume it all to be some hoax. But, like in relationships, it’s too late to go back in time. We can never go back to un-knowing about Deathmetal in that precious, mysterious way of 2016.
But, now that I’m reaching the conclusion — and I can hear you exhale a finally under your breath — what I’m realizing is that there’a much simpler question to ask: porque no los dos? What if we can accept both things to be true and exist in different spaces? Shaun has said: “something this whole weird phenomenon has made me do is actually go back to the stuff I was listening to at the time and rediscover some of those awesome records.” What if there’s a place in time for rot and one for clarity? One for shrouded ideals and one for truth-telling? One for the intrigue and one for the promise of stability? Even if it’s just a place we choose to return to to understand other things from a time we always endeavored to explore. A trip down memory lane. For now, I’m still up in the air and down for the noise.
I failed to understand why people would appreciate, let alone enjoy, the clean songs. But the answer is that Panchiko, like my partners, wouldn’t even be real without them. And that alone is comforting. Because to have someone fully by our side, they need to exist in the real world, sans rotten beauty. And this doesn’t mean we can’t ever stop to stare at them and see something completely different, something fascinating and beguiling. I think this is what Owain means when he says that “the fact that other people like [Deathmetal], and it’s become something else to other people…I think that’s brilliant.” And I wholeheartedly agree with that “the point of creating something, that it becomes something else. it’s got a life of its own, and if it means something, have it, enjoy it!”
Now we can all sit here, listen to this music, and appreciate its promise. Maybe, even get it. And, hey, even if things don’t really work out in the long run, there’s always a new way to swipe ourselves happy, find new music, stream plenty of fish in the Spotify sea, and get a new record to date.
I mean, isn’t music meant to bring people together. […] The community that made this happen are pretty amazing and I applaud their worthwhile use of the Internet, now they can get on finding some better music to listen to.
Update: after writing this, Panchiko have released remixes and demos. While I hope to sit here and dissect my relationship further one day, I’d like to leave you with this new live studio version of our beloved title track.
