Pan Daijing

Favorite piece of gear of all time.

From her 2018 Red Bull Music Academy lecture:

It’s almost broken because I travel with it all the time. I just found it on... Actually, when I was traveling here in Berlin for the first time, I wanted to get something and I just go to this Berlin eBay and it was on sale there. I was like “Oh, this looks really interesting.” And I researched it a bit. It’s also like a special thing for me because it was one of the first things that I really [got] and I had no... You know, it’s not because I heard it. It’s like you randomly walk into a restaurant and it happens to be your favorite restaurant. That’s how I felt about it and the sound was just really powerful and a lot of my work is... I really believe in improvisation because that brings out a very intuitive approach to work, which for me is very important because then it connects with authenticity and all that I believe in. So I feel like this little thing that really... Because it’s just really a wild horse. It’s handmade, from this guy in Peru. It’s not that many and not really calculated. So sometimes it just turns off while I’m even playing in the middle of my set, but that’s fine. It’s like falling off a horse, but it’s really fun when you have this specific one that’s, it’s difficult to train, but it’s fun.

From her 2017 The Quietus interview:

I travel a lot so it’s very hard for me to have a month even to stay in Berlin. Sometimes I’m just here for a couple of days and have to go again so I have smaller stuff that’s my favourite that I’ve been using from the first day I started making music and I still love it. I definitely have had phases of digging a lot into gear. I bought some and sold some. Mainly when I play live or travel, I take four pieces of gear with me. A very simple noise sequencer made by this guy named Mochika from Peru. I think there were only 100 or 200 around the world, it was a handmade thing. I have that alongside the classics by Roland and Korg - sometimes I use Korg keys but that’s it. For me playing live, those are enough with some pedals but I did a lot of recordings with the gear I don’t have that I’ve had a fantasy to record with. I was lucky enough to be able to record with a Buchla.