Heady Metal

Harsh sounds of metal being cut waft from a semi-derelict old house among fields in Yuanshan, Yilan County. There, amid the dazzling light of an electric arc, a man wearing a face shield is carefully welding two metal shells together. He connects, grinds, and burnishes them to produce a new shape. When he’s finished, he takes off his face shield, revealing his young face and brown hair.

The steel tongue drum is a 21st-century musical instrument modeled on handpans. Owing to its resonant and healing sounds, this distinctive drum is gradually gaining popularity.

Connecting the dots

Pan Tzu-tsun, who is in his late 30s, has not received any formal training in music, nor in industrial crafts. An autodidact, he established his own brand, Sine., seven years ago to promote steel tongue drums, also known as hank drums. This enterprise may look like an un­account­ably abrupt change of direction in Pan’s life, but it actually bears witness to the truth of Steve Jobs’s remark on “connecting the dots”: all the dots of Pan’s life up to that point were joined up and given a clear meaning.

Right from the beginning of his working life, Pan was unwilling to follow well-trodden career paths. This refusal to conform to conventions can be traced back to his university days. As he says, his academic training in philosophy accounts for his propensity “to challenge, to question, and to reflect.” Compared with most other people, who scramble to climb the social ladder, Pan longs for an unpretentious kind of life that allows him to be himself. However, in his search for a job that would suit his personality and help him make ends meet, he experienced one setback after another.

Always passionate about creative activities, Pan has many talents. At high school, he played drums and formed an indie band with his friends. But playing one kind of instrument alone was not enough to sate his creative appetite, and he diversified into digital music and songwriting. At university, in addition to studying philosophy, he took computer animation courses. His first job after graduation was in 3D animation.

However, he had difficulty settling into a secure but unadventurous professional life. During the financial crisis of 2007-2008, capitalism underwent critical scrutiny across the world. In that context, Pan, who had long been struggling to come to terms with his own way of life, decided to quit his job and throw himself into social movements. Subsequently he turned his back on civilized society, retuning to nature to live a primitive, hippie-inspired life. At the same time he abandoned the digital creative tools he had been adept at using and started to re-explore the long-forgotten joys of manual crafts. But fate would have it that his girlfriend should become pregnant. Their son was born, and once again Pan found himself having to grapple with the harsh economic realities of daily life.

“Back then, I didn’t know that negating and denying one’s past was actually a very dangerous thing to do,” Pan says with a faint smile. He has now put the past into perspective. Sitting in his capacious workroom, he’s surrounded by his projects in progress and other experimental works.

His current work centers on the music he has always loved, relies on craft skills, and draws substantially on his creativity. As a sole trader who manages his own brand, he also finds opportunities to utilize the multimedia tools he is already familiar with. The business thus integrates the skills and specialisms Pan has acquired at various stages of his life. At long last, this is something that suits his inclinations perfectly. It turns out that his past experiences have not been pointless.

Pan Tzu-tsun perfected his product line by experimenting with scrap gas cylinders, successfully forging his personal brand.

Boundless creativity

Seven years ago, in order to feed his family, Pan tried his hand at various jobs, such as security guard and gold dealer. None of these worked out. Driven to the last ditch, Pan and his family moved back to his childhood home in Yilan. It was at this point that Pan—always attuned to intellectual and artistic trends in the wider world—became aware of the steel tongue drum, a new type of musical instrument that was catching the wave of the emerging “maker movement.”

Pan borrowed several thousand NT dollars from relatives to buy a cutting machine and grinder and set up a rooftop workshop. Having consulted the Internet, he obtained an empty gas cylinder, cut off its top and base, welded the two parts together, and made slits in the top of the instrument to produce the eponymous “tongues,” whose vibrations bring out melodies. He then tuned each tongue by varying the lengths of the slits. This done, he had in front of him an archetypal steel tongue drum.

“Ideas kept coming to me,” Pan recalls. Even though he was essentially teaching himself and learning through trial and error, Pan took so much pleasure in this pursuit that he was keen to do more experiments. Making steel tongue drums is a complex process that allows of many variations. In striking a balance between practicality, aesthetics, and quality, one has to achieve the optimal combination of material, design, tongue arrangement, and choice of musical notes. Makers will encounter countless failures and false starts, but their creative imagination will enjoy free rein.

In order to compete with inexpensive factory-made products, Pan turned to the Internet and English-­language books to learn “faux painting” techniques that originated in European palace decor. He uses acrylic paint to imitate various mineral textures, giving cold hard metal a natural beauty that blends well with domestic spaces. “Every piece is a labor of love,” says Pan, who often finds himself racking his own brains to design new drums.   

Perfect imperfection

In the early days of Pan’s drum-making vocation, he was very hard up and had to search for usable material at rubbish dumps. This experience helps explain why Pan later found wabi-sabi—an aesthetic that values the pristine and the natural—congenial to him. “The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi sets out to find a balance between contrarieties,” he says.

Pan’s alchemical imagination is able to endow a rusty gas cylinder more than 30 years old with a sheen of tranquil solemnity, just like the surface texture of meteorites. This creative process yields a glimpse of Pan’s philosophy of life and epitomizes his career so far. Pan has traveled on bumpy roads and encountered many seemingly insurmountable barriers. But when he adopts a new perspective to reconsider things he used to think of as imperfect, he realizes that everything has a raison d’être. Only by passing through each trial and tribulation can life truly blossom, as it does now for Pan. 

Making steel tongue drums involves metalwork and the craft of musical instrument making. These intricacies, coupled with Pan’s meticulous nature, mean that each of his products has to undergo a complex set of procedures.

This steel tongue drum is coated with luminous paint. Pan decorates it with random gold leaf patterns, adding a sumptuous aura to the drum’s graceful form.