MUSIC REVIEW: BIG PAUPER - 'BEYOND MY MEANS'
Strangely Familiar Experimental Electronica on an Album That Reaches Further Than Most
(Circle Into Square Records) Big Pauper, aka Panzah Zandahz, is one of those rare prolific talents that takes stuff and tweaks, alters, customizes, and makes it his own. What’s produced isn’t some kind of rehashed ‘cool by association’ that so many mashers achieve, but a genuine slice of something new. In recent years, working as a mash-up maestro, he’s turned his hand to tunes from Beck and Radiohead and given them textural reworking. He worked on cut-and-paste processes to bring a sonically cubic approach to the familiar works of massive stars. The results were rare and quite extraordinary.
More recently, Zandahz has been working under the moniker of Big Pauper, creating organically grown electronica. Samples, cuts, and borrowed bits still feature, laced in as dressings and textures, but these days the compositions are straight from the heart and head of the maestro. This new direction was tantalizingly displayed with the Cops Eat Flowers EP, which is available for free download from the artist’s homepage.
There’s an easy psychedelia about Beyond My Means which takes all the sentiments and atmospheric pressures of Cops Eat Flowers but turns them into something a little more commercial. That’s not to say that we’ve moved into spoon-fed territory of an artist appealing for radio play; things are just more sculptured. There’s still sand on the vinyl and glitches in the play, a fizz and crackle of a digital instrumentalist at work. This is an album that feels more established, despite its utterly experimental vibe.
Faster-beating moments, like “Supression and Expansion,” which sound like a stolen soundtrack from a Burrough’s novel represent something danceable, if your friends are the kinds of people who don’t need familiar rooms to relax in. This is early '90s Hip-Hop vibed out with disorientating strings and voices of reason, calmly asserting something that you won’t quite make out. It’s both paradoxically comforting and concerned with paranoia.
The downtempo moments offer the strongest expressions of how Big Pauper views the planet. There’s time to digest and reflect. Sampled voices intertwine in a landscape of experiences; at other moments, breathless women come near to climax and encourage you to join them. Rhythms in “The Simple Life (Sequel)” are sort of pelvic and betray the activities of back rooms and not-so-carefully-hidden desires.
Humor, as well as surrealism, comes out to play, but it’s barbed and relies on intelligence and worldly wisdom of the listener to make associations, leap through concepts, and conjure their own imagery. “Firebombing My Little Dresdon” is simultaneously a heartfelt and cruel little joke. No real harm is meant, opera is assimilated, love is expressed -- so is a kind of endearing annihilation. Sequencers swirl; a guitar, or something like it, kind of jangles somewhere beneath the surface, and a beat cascades like coins through your fingers. No real harm is done, but of a scale, there is something devastatingly wonderful about this stuff.
“Your Nighttime Energy is the Dream of the Elf” and “The Stale Breath of 1000 Lucrative Club Bangers” are the abstract yet familiar twists of hyper reality that represent artistic highlights of the collection. However, “With The Terrorists,” with its sampled voices describing the near-impossible ambition of pacifism within this current fearful climate, is a shrewd display of Big Pauper’s real awareness and his genuine concerns beyond art. In the middle of all the madness, here is the most lucid dream.
Beyond My Means as a title displays a kind of self-deprecation or perhaps sardonic response to a critic who never expected much from the artist. It could also be a twisted pun about reaching beyond definition. As an album, it has the same feeling as Beck’s Mellow Gold. The two albums don’t sound alike, nor do they fit within the same genre, but the energy is similar. There’s a pioneering spirit and a sense of exploration that others will most likely emulate, knowing that the territory isn’t entirely uncharted because Big Pauper got there first. He may not have made it safe, but he’s made it more familiar. Sort of.
Standout Tracks: “The Simple Life,” “With The Terrorists,” “Firebombing My Little Dresdon”
For Fans Of: The Books, Broadcast, Beck
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