Panamint Manse: Domestic Hallucinations on Dusty Winds

Panamint Manse talks to Stewart Gardiner about tumultuous empathy, hauntology in the desert and where jubilance meets desolation

Synths in the desert. Dislocated melodies float out upon waves of heat and linger in the cold of night. There’s trauma under the too-much-sunlight, but an abundance of hope too. This is music that is a working through; a journey towards positivity.

I imagine Panamint Manse sitting out in the desert, underneath a rudimentary radio antenna. He’s carefully adjusting dials, like a child with a new toy. The idea is not to pick up signals from nearby LA, but to capture something of the alien – the other. Although it’s not an attempt to make contact with anything out there, but rather capture what’s in here. Fragments of peculiarly British electronic music start to filter through in grainy form, the incessant crackle not just indicating the distance travelled, but also the age of the sampled materials. The desert soaks up these sounds, over exposing them until they take on a sunnier sort of eeriness. Panamint listens, records and learns.

Panamint Manse’s self-released The Gravel Ghost album is hauntology (dis)located in the American frontier. It’s Philip Marlowe driving Jon Brooks out of Los Angeles. It’s Chinatown set to library music. Panamint Manse makes raw and intuitive electronic music that maintains a sense of innocence. He never gives into cynicism, despite the knowledge that hard earned truths may still slip away like sand through fingers. The trick is to give in to the flow.

I didn’t make it out to the desert, but opened a line of long distance communication instead. Although the distance didn’t seem so far once we got talking.

Please introduce yourself and your project Panamint Manse.

Hello. I’m Wayne and I live in the Mojave Desert. I make crafty electronic music in my spare time as Panamint Manse – a modestly mid-fi approach to Hauntologically informed semi-retro synthyness that often eschews that un-genre’s more sinister tendencies to seek rapture.

Panamint Manse sounds like a place once visited you’d never return from. Is it a place of darkness or light?

Oh, definitely light, and you can come and go as you like. Sometimes I think it might be more infirmary than Manse. The desert is oppressive and more than a bit frightening! We’re all hurting out here. It’s an invitation to come inside to be consoled. Sure you might have a hard time finding us on a map, and the walls might be a little obscured, but rest assured we’re here to help.

You describe your output as “colourfully homespun electronic music”. Can you talk about your aesthetics and approach to production?

I describe it that way to curb expectation. I’ve always been an obsessive music fan, but I’m a beginner when it comes to actually making music. Over the last few years I’ve managed to piece together a small home studio. I use mostly hardware synthesizers, eurorack modules, effects pedals, and samples to make my music. I’m particularly fond of instruments made by Vermona. I’ll often record to cassette tape and incorporate media artifacts for texture. Live is my sequencer, but I try to be very hands on and (often unsuccessfully) aspire to keep multitracking to a minimum.

I’m naturally self-effacing, and so developing a point of view has been a challenge. I like the idea of exploring more opaque territory, but having an unsophisticated sonic vocabulary means I tend to favor simple melodies and arrangements. I know what I like, and when I stumble upon a pattern or phrase that speaks to me, it’s one of the best feelings in the world. Sometimes I reverse engineer passages from old library tracks as a starting point from which to branch out melodically. But like, I didn’t understand that songs could change key until a few months ago, so I have a lot to learn (by doing).

You’ve said that you make music mostly for personal enjoyment, but also as a means of working through emotional trauma related to the fact that you care for the dying in your community. If you don’t mind, could you talk about music making as a cathartic experience? Do your experiences at work feed directly into the sort of music you make?

In the beginning it was definitely a factor. I was taking long on-call nights with a hospice agency when I decided to start finishing songs for my first album. I’d be driving about the desert in the early morning hours tending to terminal patients and their families who were having trouble. Some of my responsibilities were horrifying, and yet I did find moments of profound dignity. I tend toward tumultuous empathy and not having sufficient coping mechanisms nearly destroyed me. The thin light of early evening would make me physically ill, and I knew that I needed an escape. So you might say that diverting my attention to making music was a way of being able to control something… an attempt at managing feelings of helplessness while knee deep in the haptics of caring.

I still do work in that field, but within a more manageable capacity which provides me enough recovery time to foster creativity. On those days, I try my best to recognize that it’s the bits of joyful resignation that really matter. Affirmation via unbiased play.

How do you hope your music makes listeners feel?

The opposite of edgy. Connected and comfortably withdrawn from considering the optics. Wistful but present. To some it might seem wrong footed to make nostalgically inclined music, especially now, but for me it’s radical to present non commercially minded songs that assert no aspiration beyond sharing, growing, and embracing vulnerability.

Describe each of your releases in a few words.

Call of the Cactus Wren

An inverse ransom note and a quaint hello from out here. The first songs I ever finished, stitched up between very long nights.

The Gravel Ghost

Songs of resilience blossoming in impossible climates. Prismatic melange of stilted haunty synthpop for the desaturated. The second batch of songs I ever finished, assembled during relocation and finding it easier to breathe.

We got chatting about films by Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch before arranging this interview. What’s your relationship with cinema and is it an influence on Panamint Manse? The intro to “Widow Train” sounds like a lost cue from 1960s or 1970s new wave European cinema – perhaps something like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders.

I can’t front, I mostly watch YouTube, but I feel like my appreciation for movies might be slightly above average? I mean, I have a bunch of Criterions (yes, Valerie) and a healthy Cinemageddon account. While I currently don’t see much of a conscious influence of film on my work, moving forward I do hope to develop the more cinematic elements that might be present. I feel plenty of room to grow in regards to sonic mise en scene, sustaining tension, and creating more interesting arrangements.

The basis for “Widow Train” is a heavily processed sample from a lost library record and a field recording I captured during a rainy midnight visit to Elmer’s Bottle Tree Ranch on old Route 66.

You’ve mentioned that Listening Center’s music is an inspiration and was one of the catalysts for you to start finishing songs a few years ago. Can you talk more about this?

I wouldn’t want to involve him without his permission, so I’ll just say that it was “Our Material” on GBX712 that I was listening to when I thought, “Maybe I could do something like that!” Everything about that song is so succinct, charming, effortless. I aspire to reduce clutter and distill essence the way he’s managed to.

I’m interested in a sense of place in music. You grew up near Los Angeles and live in the desert. What does place mean to your music?

We moved here in the mid 80s and I vividly remember how wondrous it felt while exploring. Ten years old camping out with my best friend to hunt UFOs in the night. The creepiness of abandoned mattresses, cars, and buildings in midday, nowhere. Finding hidden places. But by adolescence I was embarrassed about being from here. I’d visit the city and have daydreams of a cultured life. Humid air. But in maturity I’ve learned to love the desert, to spend time with it, and again find it’s hidden places. In a way it’s been my most consistent friend. A friend who could kill me on a bad night, but that also provides an abundance of inspiration as the starting point for themes, titles, and the visual identity of the project. The ‘logo’ I use for Panamint Manse is actually just an old railroad crossing sign. Public domain. But there is a fantastic element at play, as well. Domestic hallucinations on dusty winds. I’m not sure I’ll ever leave at this point. LA is only an hour and change away.

Interestingly, your work fits nicely alongside the likes of Ghost Box records. You’ve said that some of the cultural touchstones might be lost on you – you’ve read Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, but didn’t presumably live the references as you grew up in America. Can you talk about your attraction to Ghost Box and the hauntological?

I was born in the late 70s and grew up with Synthpop. At twenty I became obsessed with Drum & Bass records. I tried to make some tracks but never really gave it a go. Follow that through line to circa 2005 and I was buying lots of early Dubstep 12”s. I especially loved Skull Disco and so naturally became a fan of Mordant Music. I had procured a few small synthesizers but still couldn’t manage to finish anything. A few years later I saw a video for The Advisory Circle’s ‘Sundial’ and was completely arrested. Here was music that was gently transportive, intimately eerie, genderless, temporally ambiguous. It was disarming. Having been concerned with bass oriented music for so long, I suddenly felt a sense of relief. It was the good kind of surrender, and I realized that I didn’t have to compete. Exploring Ghost Box and related artists directed me to various unguarded starting points from which I might finally be able to participate. My songs are the result of investigating and incorporating those extended influences, refracted through the lens of my experience. And while my admiration for their work can’t be understated, I am trying to develop my own style and it’s certainly not my intent to imitate nor appropriate. I often worry it might read arrogant to think I would have anything to add to that conversation, and I probably don’t right now, but as access to obscene amounts of media continues to grow, I inversely feel less pressure to come up with anything as relevant. It’s the implied narratives and rural playfulness that resonate with me most.

I’m Scottish and was born in the late seventies, so Ghost Box references a lot of culture that I grew up with. However, I’ve also always been fascinated by Americana. I might dream of Raymond Chandler’s LA and what lies beyond the city, for example, but I’ve never been there. Is there something about otherness that is only just removed enough from our own experience to influence us? Your song title “Peggy at the Clothesline” feels like it could be something from my childhood (Peggy was my grandmother’s name).

I think there is. I was recently kidding with my partner about how I can’t watch family dramas or cop shows made in the US, but set them in Europe or the UK and I’m transfixed. The writing becomes less noticeable and I find it easier to be spirited away. Obviously there’s a multitude of factors that affect our perceptions of a place or how it’s people might live, and we all have varying degrees of romanticism for them. Especially now that everywhere most of us aren’t is often presented in such an appealing way. I guess that averting my more Anglophilic tendencies for dive bar guitars and Manson family bonfire chants might reinforce the sense of place in my sound, but that would be insincere. It’s the juxtaposition of jubilance in desolation that I’m interested in. Practical incantations for kindred spirits.

By the way, ‘Peggy at the Clothesline’ gets its title from running Peggy Seeger chirping the woes of domesticity through the modular. Yay, though I tend laundry in the valley of death!

What’s next for Panamint Manse?

Working on a new album that I’ll eventually shop around to crickets and self release in summer. Collaborating with The Heartwood Institute on songs about parapsychology. Attending my first NAMM in late January as a guest of STG Soundlabs. Overdosing on spoonfuls of marshmallow creme, straight from the jar.

What artists are you listening to at the moment?

Tona Ohama, Mark Renner, Vic Mars. I’m collecting Minimal Wave records at the moment, so lots of those. And to be fair, I’m never really not listening to Jon Brooks.

Persona or Mulholland Drive?

Oh, Mulholland Drive. Between Betty’s obsession with validation via adoration, the musty resignation of Diane Selwyn curdling in her apartment, and the terror of narrative in Club Silencio, it completely dismantles me every time!

panamintmanse.bandcamp.com