- Late in the afternoon on June 29, Lee Gamble started to blast jungle rhythms at MoMA PS1. It was the first installment of Warm Up 2013, the Queens-based museum's annual summer concert series, and eager partygoers had turned up in droves. PS1 often attracts a crowd ambivalent to or oblivious of the performers on the lineup—except for the headliners—and this time it seemed that many of them had made the trek to Long Island City to enjoy the summer weather with their toddlers, friends or music industry cohorts. Most probably didn't realize that they were attending the last day of PAN_ACT, Bill Kouligas's first attempt to construct a two-week-long music and arts festival in New York around his PAN label—and they seemed surprised to hear jungle.
They were probably expecting high energy house and exalting vocals, which is exactly what the headliner, Juan Atkins, delivered. It took a while to fill the dance floor that day, perhaps because the PAN artists weren't concerned with adapting their sets to suit the mood of the party—in Kouligas's eyes, playing more accessible tunes would likely be seen as an artistic concession. "I don't really compromise on any level," he said before his opening set at PS1. "I don't care about any fake career obsessions whatsoever. I just do what I want and do my own thing." The sentiment held true for the other PAN representatives at Warm Up: NHK Koyxen served up dark, pounding techno in the middle of the sunny afternoon, and Heatsick tickled slow, tropical-tinged house beats on a Casio keyboard. When Atkins stepped up at the end of the night, the crowd seemed eager to hear more accessible or classic tunes, and responded enthusiastically to tracks like the Martian's driving 1993 cut "Star Dancer."
Every aspect of the multidisciplinary festival, which spanned from June 14 to 29, had a conceptual undercurrent. At best, the artists were able to deliver abstract ideas in a fun and engaging environment, but at worst, they came off a bit alienating and abstruse. The lectures were the most likely to bore, because the speakers weren't interested in lecturing per se, opting instead to riff with each other about topics that occasionally wandered too deep into abstract art theories. But many of the speakers provided compelling insights into the ideas packed into their work. Multidisciplinary artist James Hoff, for example, described the process of making a rhythmic sound piece he created by converting a WAV file into binary and injecting a computer virus into the code, which was then distributed to people via dance music. "I like to take conceptual art out into a venue where people can come and dance, and have fun experiencing something that's conceptually driven," Hoff said.
The nighttime affairs carried out Hoff's theory, especially PAN_ACT's collaboration with regular New York party the Bunker, which featured appearances by Keith Fullerton Whitman, Laurel Halo, Lee Gamble and Regis. While the Bunker usually takes place in Williamsburg, this time they set up shop at a Chinese buffet restaurant in a more desolate neighborhood in Queens. In true PAN style, all the performances took an abstract approach to entertaining the dance floor, which only added to the weirdness of the space itself: the dance floor was set up at the back of the restaurant, past the booths, lifeless Chinese sculptures and long, empty buffet tables. Whitman rolled out a quadraphonic speaker set up to surround the dancers with arrhythmic modular synth tones, and eschewed drums for a less structured style. Gamble halted his DJ set cold more than once, which seemed each time to signal the end of his performance, only to strike up a beat again and rebuild a different mood from scratch. Compared to the other acts, Regis's set was the most straightforward, but his selection of rigid techno beats propelled the ravers until dawn broke over the restaurant's massive parking lot.