PANTEA – Everydaymeal

Czaszka (Rec.)

On one of the countless bad days of this goddamn year, an unexpected nice digression came courtesy of a young artist from Tehran whose studies and interests call for her transcontinental presence across several cities. The operational ambit of Pantea Armanfar is that of sequential organizations of field recordings morphing into unusual marriages of mnemonic and psychoacoustic repercussions.

The idiosyncrasies of Everydaymeal are clear from the start, reflecting positively on a listener’s attitude. Combining sources of variable origin, Pantea offers an explorative fresco devoid of noxious individualism. Metropolitan to rural, social to private, plus an awful lot of intermediate transitions including noisier outbursts and taped snippets. Every sound promptly establishes a definite atmosphere, whether one understands its derivation or not. Decoding indecisions and foolish frills are not part of the game. We can dwell on a subsonic frequency, on variously voiced birds, on brews comprising echoes from an urban landscape dense with human activity, or the familiar resonance of a marine wash. A “lo-fi” temperament is maintained throughout, yet the whole remains quite intelligible even during altered realities informed by dreamlike, quasi-psychedelic scents. Warped/dehumanized voices are deftly implemented in that regard.

All in all, forty minutes of aural stimulation of proven depth, causing no percentage whatsoever of misbelief in this writer. It is not easy nowadays to work intelligently with this type of raw material, but Pantea offered something commendable to our ears. We rejoice at the discovery of her unique microcosm.