Pan-Pot

Berlin’s Pan-Pot emerged at the peak of the minimal-techno era, and they have maintained a firm grip on the leanest, most exacting strains of dance music ever since. Tassilo Ippenberger and Thomas Benedix met in a Berlin music production school shortly after moving to the city in the early 2000s, just as punchy, stripped-down grooves were taking the scene by storm. They issued their Popy & Caste EP on Anja Schneider’s fledgling Mobilee label in 2005; two years later, on their debut album, Pan-O-Rama, they traced the line between studio precision and dance-floor abandon in keenly controlled drum programming and woozy effects. While keeping up a steady stream of singles, albums and remixes for artists like Booka Shade and Paul Kalkbrenner, Pan-Pot have particularly distinguished themselves as DJs, releasing mix albums like 2014’s Watergate 17 and frequent live sets from festivals like CRSSD and Time Warp, where their spiralling sequences and heart-in-mouth tempos practically leap from the speakers.