Panchroma by Waterwheel (Review)

Panchroma exists somewhere between the worlds of Seefeel and O Yuki Conjugate.
Panchroma - Waterwheel

One problem with having a large, completely disorganized CD collection is that I easily lose the CDs I own. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve searched the various racks and shelves in my room, scanning the spines for the right combination of color and typeface that will tell me I’ve found what I’m looking for. There is, however, an upside, which is that I often rediscover albums that I purchased years ago but lost track of over the years. They’ve been left waiting patiently for me to stumble across them on the shelf, to pick them up and appreciate them all over again.

Panchroma is one such CD. I purchased this CD 5 or 6 years ago, all the while planning to make mention of it on Opus because it really is a delightful album. But things being the way they are, it got relegated to the “Land of Misfit CDs” along with the likes of Sweet Trip, Color Filter, Rialto, Friends of Dean Martinez, Tear Ceremony, and countless others. All of them were CDs that I reviewed in my mind, but whose reviews never quite made it into HTML.

Dusting off Panchroma, I vaguely remembered that the group did some interesting electro-acoustic work, so I threw the CD into my bag and took it to work. Once I started listening to it on my headphones, I suddenly remembered the lush sonic craftsmanship that had infatuated me so long ago.

Panchroma exists somewhere between the worlds of Seefeel and O Yuki Conjugate. It exhibits the former’s skill at creating dreamy, chilled out electronic soundscapes, and the latter’s ability to create living, breathing sounds that touch on ethnic and organic influences. You might also hear elements of Tortoise and even some obtuse dreampop à la Slowdive’s Pygmalion, but Panchroma still manages to avoid easy classification.

The primary reason is that Waterwheel experiments with a wide array of sounds on the album’s 17 tracks. Combine that with a relatively short playing time — around forty minutes — and you get an album that has a great sense of economy. To help organize things, the album is divided into several sections. The first seven tracks comprise “Panchroma: Biomechanisms Installment One” and the other 10 make up “Colors, Sparks, Signals: Sonic Carousels Volume One.” Aside from being rather imaginative names, they do a somewhat decent job of describing their respective sonic makeup.

The album gets the ball rolling, figuratively, with the pumping and wheezing rhythms of “Cascade Florale.” Soft ambient textures flutter and pulse along with the rhythm, creating a lush panorama of sounds that never sits still. As the track progresses, middle-eastern flutes and percussion begin working their way into the already dense mix, adding an unexpected exotic flourish. At five minutes, it’s one of the album’s longest and most straightforward tracks, but it gives one a good sense of just how many ideas the group tries to pack into their songs.

“Rasputin — Lushevening” takes the same pumping rhythms of the previous track and slows them down. This time, the ambience is sleepier and more hallucinatory, comparable to Seefeel’s most spaced out moments on Quique. “Cosmi” submerges the listener in a deep groove, with thick vinyl crackling and forlorn drones.

However, as the album moves into the second section of songs, it gets progressively less song-like, instead venturing into the realm of sound bites. “Moody Spurdgeon” sounds like a gypsy instrumental stuck in an endless loop as the instruments slowly go out of tune. “Glyph” might be the sound of someone scanning the dial of an old AM radio; snippets of what might be an old-timey fiddle piece are barely heard, and then clipped by a burst of static. Both of these songs owe a debt to Steve Reich, but at the same time, don’t come off as juvenile attempts to cop Music for 18 Musicians. “Airplaneshadows” seems relatively sedate, with a swirling mix of bells and atmospherics, but it creates the same sort of tension as incidental music in a film.

“Bright Informational Chain Pulse Shower Version II” is quite a mouthful, but the track deserves such a title. The song sounds like an entire Steve Reich orchestra condensed to a minute and a half. Kalimba and xylophone-like sounds bubble forth, compressed to play out their complex melodies in an extremely short amount of time. Adopting a geekier metaphor, it could be the audio equivalent of a T1 line, with packets of information dancing and colliding over millions of miles of fiber optics.

“Goldenmachinegunfire” looks back to “Moody Spurdgeon” and “Airplaneshadows,” but this time the song is bathed in static that slowly overwhelms and suffocates its fragile tones. “Silent as Angels” is another appropriately titled track, a sparkling mirage of crystalline sounds that is far too short. In fact, that’s how I feel about all of the songs on this album. They’re just too short, offering only the briefest of glimpses into a fascinating world of sound.

But the paradox is that their brevity only enhances their beauty. The fact that these tracks don’t last longer makes them far more interesting than if their ideas were given time to grow stale. Because you don’t have much time, you study them more, trying to drink in all of their depth (of which these brief songs show an amazing amount). At the same time, their sudden end often makes the experience that much more poignant.

As if touching on that concept of poignancy and transience, the album ends with the frail sonar pings of “Tone Cluster for Melanie Morgan.” Over the track’s 3 minutes, the pulses are run through Steve Reich’s phase techniques, splitting them apart and playing them against each other. The result is a song that feels vaguely but beautifully out of synch with itself and the listener (especially if listened to on headphones). Like all of the album’s tracks, it’s far too brief, fading out just as it realigns itself. But in its short, simple lifetime, it possesses a staggering beauty.

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