- PAN steps into the experimental pop arena with this baroque-leaning record from a crucial Athens artist.
- A spandrel is something useless—a part of our body that contributes nothing to our survival. The chin is one example. Finding others is a tricky task, since you can almost always come up with a reason for something. Athens producer Evita Manji thinks otherwise, and their debut album of baroque pop, Spandrel?, wonders if there isn't a more obvious deadweight among us.
Manji is part of a new wave of underground club music producers in Athens, headed up by artists like hyperpop producer BABYNYMPH and labels such as Trial & Error. Spandrel?, however, is not a dance music record. Released on PAN, it's the latest contribution to the Berlin label's small but memorable collection of vocal-led, avant-pop moments. It's song-based music that retains PAN's fondness for challenging, multi-faceted work that has something distinct in its approach and something urgent to say.
And there is a lot that Spandrel? has to say. After Athens endured devastating forest fires in July 2021, Manji put together a compilation on their own label, MYXOXYM, and donated the proceeds to ANIMA, a charity that works to rehabilitate animals and return them to their natural habitat. This solidarity spills over into the album, with "Oil/Too Much" giving voice to the animal kingdom—"I'm drowning in oil / I can't get out," and "I'm drowning in black gold"—suggesting that human greed is to blame. This is subject matter that lends itself to sanctimony, but Manji handles it with a grace both modest and heartfelt.
Manji's production is equally elegant, lifting the album's grief with grand, sometimes big-room touches. Prominent trance-baiting synths contrast the album's stuttery signal crackle and hefty kick drums. "The Lungs Of A Burning Body" is almost an emo anthem, with its desperate and catchy melody, while the gargled vocoder on "Lies?" briefly brings to mind the bagpipe trills from the Titanic score. These moments make Spandrel? feel approachable (more than you might expect from a record on PAN) but also larger than life, like it's concerned with matters that are more important than our daily wants and needs.
Which is where its existential lyrics come in. Lines like, "Will you still be there / waiting for me / until I get the strength to become matter again?" from album closer "Black Hole," or the refrain, "A body that's not mine / and I can't escape," on "Body/Prison," capture an inner turmoil. Couple that with the album cover—Manji's head plugged into wires—and you've got a handful of allusions to Descartes theory of the mind and body as two separate entities, popularised by works like Ghost In The Shell, The Matrix, Serial Experiments Lain and The Amber Spyglass.
In that last book, the ghosts of the dead find salvation when their physical forms finally dissolve into atoms, to be spread around the universe and become one with every living thing. Manji seems to yearn for a similar peace on Spandrel?, one where we’re free of our rigid forms and their carnal desires which are a burden to us and our environment. Maybe the chin is only the beginning—our whole bodily existence, and all that it comes with, is just one big spandrel.