Fact's Jong Pang feature: The Way Things GO!

Fact online feature about a quietly spectacular musical brain, May 2007:

“Hi! I am in the studio recording percussion, let me get quiet. Hi! Right! I am all ears. And head; and eyes. And mouth.” These are not my first words with Jong Pang, these are my first words with Anders Rhedin. That’s because Jong Pang is no-one: neither a collective nor a producer alias nor a band. According to the earnest and incredibly likable leader-slash-producer Anders, Jong Pang is “a brand! It’s a vibe, an atmosphere. It’s an identity, like a company – but not a corporation! It’s a not a band, it’s not a collective, it’s an idea of what a band could be. It’s not the people in it and not me. At the moment I’m the conductor and I’m looking after it, but one day someone could hold it and it would be theirs.”
Being faintly scared of all animals bigger than me, I’ve never ridden a horse bareback through an Aurora Borealis-lit snowfield to worship a God whose name is a colour not a word, but I bet it would sound like just like Jong Pang if I done. There’s a great Fischli/Weiss video of two people dressed as a bear and a rat on his myspace beating sticks over the Alpine clouds, and it’s really, really fitting because his music is just like. It’s like when you dress up as a bear with a friend at a party and you pretend to play-fight-dance like one and somewhere along the way you forget – just a little bit, for a second – that you’re human and not a bear, and you never talk about it with your friend because you forget about it a minute later but you know it was real (because it was) and so does your friend. That’s what it’s like; and once ancestral and completely new. And really fun.
After Danish indie hopes Moon Gringo drifted apart in 2004, Anders set about rebuilding his musical universe. “You know, I stopped reading music magazines, and stopped listening to indie rock. Imagine that! I cut out what I had been listening to since forever, which was like European music and American music of the last 30 years. Folk music from around the world, composers like Arvo Part and Steve Reich was what I filled my head with. It is so fucking exciting to hear this when you have been listening to the same rhythms all of your life! That was the idea behind Jong Pang: I wanted to see what Steve Reich would sound like if he was a rock band.”
Anders’ “musical trip” was focused on the pop moment rather than any ‘architectural’ follies, building immaculately one-dimensional, instant creations out of an ever-expanding world of organic instruments and foreign feelings: a kind of comfortable treatment of musical extremes, a sumptuous remapping of indie, running through Reich’s curt vocal jabs to African polyrhythmic drumming to swoonsome, engulfing shoegaze. “I love the way that as soon as you listen to [Steve Reich], a whole universe opens up, but if you just listen with one ear, it’s nothing. I mean, I always say Thanks! when someone describes me as pop: I love to dance to Friday I’m In Love. It’s the most pure, poetical music imaginable: to merge quality with underlying experimentation to create this universe.”
Universe is one of Anders’ favourite words: it comes up a lot in conversation. Is that why he ditched the band to be a producer? Don’t all great studio heads want to build and control their musical universe? “Yes! I suppose I’m a producer like Brian Eno is: I saw this fantastic quote when he said that everyone is an engineer, and I think that I like to direct music, to make every single certain thing unfold rather than take a guitar and sing a story about my life.” But Jong Pang doesn’t sound like one man’s inner visions: it sounds too ritualistic, too collective, too much fucking fun to be the product of complete singular control. Fine for some, but UK distribution-TBC debut album Bright White Light doesn’t sound like one person’s inner world, but a group’s collective imagination. Doesn’t control get stifling? Isn’t it, well, boring? “At first you have freedom, which is nice, but then there’s an element of loneliness, which is not so nice. So I wanted to share the creative process.” Like outsourcing? “Yes! Outsourcing atmospheres, so it wasn’t a solo record: it was very easy to give this record out: I was lucky to know so many talented people. Now is a bit of time when I’ve conducted it, but I could be anyone: they never have one sole emperor: it is not an imperialist way!” Anders pauses. “One day Jong Pang might be nothing to do with me. I think I realized it a month ago: if I only have absolute control, which is what happens with something perfect, it is not really perfect: even if you have 100% control, you can never really have 100% control. There will always be something that bothers you. Because you are not completely satisfied: it’s impossible! So, what is more fun is what takes more time: thinking that you could completely involve everyone into working with Jong Pang, free from ideas of it as you. Sometimes, it is like a cult: a strange indie cult.”
What’s next? “We play live at festivals, which is great: translating the studio outside with two drummers, a cellist and six singers. We are recording much of the new album with relation to the outdoors, and playing more concerts. With the new album, I don’t want to wait or linger, but you have to wait, have to be inspired. You have to gather information.”