Panoramica: The Sounds of Dunedin

Panoramica is Wellingtonian Dan Smith, who has performed with the Angry Rabbits numerous times over the past five years, and whose shimmering, wine-dark track Santorini Blue [*] graced our recent compilation CD, Apropos of Nothing.

To make this album Smith, who has lived in Dunedin for the past three years, made recordings of the Dunedin soundscape, cut up these recordings, and reassembled them into tracks. Whereas some field recordists look for the unusual, or process their sounds found until they're no longer recognisable, Smith has opted to use every day sounds verbatim, sequencing them into strange, rhythmic, looping patterns. The result is oddly affecting, a sort of understated, soothing but insistent brain fuck.

I first heard the tracks in this collection as a set played at the Apropos of Nothing CD release in Wellington in August 2008. Dan's was the last set of the night, but though I was a bit tired I found Panoramica's whirling sonic phantasms, combined with VJ Yetimon's bizarre cutups of bacterial formations and kinetic art, to be the highlight of the gig.

While you won't have any visual accompaniment listening to "The Sounds of Dunedin", I hope you will get a sense of what I felt - the ordinary transmuted into something quite extraordinary.

-- Stuart McDonald, 2008

Panoramica has graciously allowed us to make this album a free download. You may obtain it from archive.org or listen to it here.

Also please check out Dan's page about the compilation (with explication!) on his handsome website.

* Apparently the Ancient Greeks didn't have a word for 'blue'.