Pan Sonic 27/03/01 Toronto

[Julian Knowles <j.knowles@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 1:09 PM -0500 30/3/01, Matthew Boughner wrote:
> I had a bad feeling about the Pan Sonic show in Toronto from the 
> moment I got to
> the venue.
>
> Pan Sonic took the stage after fine sets by both Thomas Yirku and Polmo Popol,
> and attempted to put on a show.  Mika turned both monitors toward the crowd in
> an effort to boost the volume level.  Ilpo continued to play as Mika roamed
> between the stage and the sound board.  At one point one of the 
> monitors glowed
> bright orange.  Finally Mika took the stage for one last fuck you 
> squelch.  Both
> members retired to the back of the club and left the confused crowd 
> waiting for
> anything.
>
> When news got around that they weren't going to play because they were unhappy
> with the sound system I left.  I stopped to talk to Mika on the way out, and I
> must say that he looked more like a man who's puppy had just been shot than a
> rock star.  I respect them for not putting on a show that they felt 
> was unworthy
> of their fans and themselves.


Interesting... I did the mix for Pan Sonic here in Sydney and i can 
appreciate issues to do with the inedequacy of the PA system in a 
venue.. They need a really big, hugely powerful PA to really 
potentialise what is happening (notice i didn't say 'loud'). The main 
issue is that they use test signals at very high amplitudes, 
particularly the oscillator. If it is set to full tilt @ 10Hz then 
that is what you get... No fairy dust or smoothing... Its a pretty 
scarey prospect from a live sound point of view.. I had a *very* 
large Martinsound system in a moderate sized room with 600 people in 
it and i had the system working to its absolute limit from 120Hz 
down.. The opening of the show was a sine sweep down to subsonic 
frequencies which had all my clip lights on the crossover rack go 
full red for the low frequency output.. I had to take some radical 
action to avoid blowing the subs and the amplifier racks along with 
them... It took  -12db full cut @ 100Hz down  to get the crossovers 
out of clip... A kick drum would never ever do that... Totally full 
on... never had to do that before..  Even when winding out the bottom 
end to bring the system back into the safe zone you didn't really 
hear a difference, as the frequency of the oscillator was so damn low 
as to be virtually inaudible (but with incredible amounts of gain). 
People near the stacks did say, though ,that they could feel the hair 
on their arms standing up, so a lot of air must have been moving in 
the room..

i found that if you looked at their video oscilloscope it helped you to mix...

As for Ilpo and Mika, they are fine, but they are pretty particular 
about how they sound which is fair enough, given the difficulty of 
the signals they are dealing with. The only issue i had was that when 
we soundchecked I had mountains of headroom in the system and 
everything was comfortable - During the gig, though, they gave me at 
least 20 db more of the oscillator which is what freaked the system 
out..  I don't like compressing things too hard per se but a good 
multiband compressor would have done a lot of the hard work to make 
it sound good.

So i can sympathise with both venues and the group. They basically 
need a system which is way over specified for the room. Venues do not 
anticipate this (why should they?). I actually had a funny 
conversation with Ilpo about all of the PAs they have blown up in 
their performance career. I didn't doubt him for one minute having 
been on the end of their signals for one night.

--
**************************
J u l i a n  K n o w l e s
Lecturer/Co-ordinator Music Technology
Course Co-ordinator Electronic Arts
School of Contemporary Arts (Music), University of Western Sydney
Social Interiors web: http://www.geocities.com/socialinterior