Mix-16-text-2

I was so awestruck with the beauty of ‘Mono No Aware’ – PAN‘s first compilation released in 2017, collating unreleased ambient tracks from both new and existing PAN artists – that I wanted to dig a little deeper into the cryptic name for the album.

Mono-no-aware (物の哀れ), or ‘pathos of things’, is a Japanese term that is difficult to translate, maybe as ‘an empathy towards things’ or ‘a special sensitivity towards ephemeral things’. In classical Japanese literature and poetry, it refers to the aesthetic ideal of ‘mono-no-aware’, which implies a particular sensitivity of awareness and responsiveness to something, an inanimate object or even a living being, or an emotional response to a person. This choreographic project challenges and summons different imagery and poetic materials, starting from this place of memory and evocation, and simultaneously acceptance and contemplation of the present time and its transience. A nostalgic body that is unbalanced between two temporal filters and two realities, the past, the present and an idea of ​​the future. Do images die on stage and are taken off stage? If a body did not dissolve, did not disappear like fog, would things lose the power to move us?. – Rafael Alvarez