Premiere: Pander Sera, ‘Gazebo’

Kevin Bronson on February 14th, 2019

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Pander Sera is an anagram for — and the artistic moniker of — Sean Draper, whose audiovisual exploits include simultaneously playing drums, singing and working a table of effects pedals, in addition to creating visuals. Pander Sera’s weapons are feedback and noise — as tools to express the noise, internal and external, of everyday life, which in her case includes the “oscillations she feels living on the cusps of perceived genders.” The deeper the listener’s immersion, the greater the catharsis.

The project began in 2012 in Santa Cruz, in the aftermath of the suicide of a childhood friend. Draper relocated to L.A. in 2014 and, with family and friends, built a recording studio, Mateo Sound. It was there that the debut Pander Sera album, “Bothy” (out March 22 on Mateo Sound), was recorded with producer-engineer David Burris. It’s an album of caustic abandon mixed with bright, melodic moments, heavy music that’s emblematic of heavy issues. She cites depression, suicide, gender dysphoria, independence, conformity and agency among them. It’s the road to inner truth as heard from the inside of an engine, without earplugs.

The new song “Gazebo” is a 2 1/2-minute agitant built around furious drums (the artist’s first instrument) and synthesized vocals. “‘Gazebo’ is largely about when I was dealing with bouts of insomnia and night terrors in my early childhood, how I’d be kept up wide-eyed thinking about how I could even exist and if there would be some kind of end-credits sequence when I finally died,” Pander Sera says. “It references how I’d have to play with Legos or jigsaw puzzles to pass the time until dawn just to keep myself from repetitious dreams of fatality.

“The subject’s gender swaps back and forth, addressing the early adopted dichotomy of identity I would often apply to myself. I would experience sudden hyperventilation, often a perceived speeding up/slowing down of time, shadowboxing with hallucinations, sleepwalking up and down bunk bed ladders, all the while searching for a way to move on and move out of my own head because I knew sleep was something I’d have to deal with my whole life and knew I had to figure out a way to embrace it. It morphed into a metaphor for overcoming significant personal obstacles.”

||| Stream: “Gazebo”