Niaiw Ot Vile

Chris Douglas' story reads like a lesson in the development of outsider electronic music over the past 20 years. He began throwing the first ambient techno parties in San Francisco at just 16 years old, and moved to Detroit a year later to begin working with Mike Banks (Underground Resistance) and James Stinson (Drexciya).His PAN debut, dedicated to his friend, the sadly deceased musician and Isolate Records founder Wai Cheng (Optic), is a complex and cavernous exercise in texture and rhythm, marrying the freedom and tonal breadth of electro-acoustic composition with percussive patterns disjointed to the point of collapse. It is easy to see how his work is often critically received as emotionally challenging. There is a closeness to these compositions, and his muscular, full spectrum passages are often counteracted with brittle and delicate detail.