![]() (The members of the band have only ever released their first names to the public.) “Have you seen this?” he wrote to Andy, who was with his girlfriend in Korea at the time. He reached for his phone to text an old friend. Why do people like this so much?”Īfter a bit of back and forth, it quickly dawned on him that this was no joke. “Like, there's so much good music on the internet. “I was like, wait, what? Are you pulling my leg? Do people really like this?” Owain tells VICE. Then they'd get back to us and say, ‘it's not me’ or ‘never heard of it’ and we'd be back to square one.” “The search would die down but then we'd find a new potential lead and excitement would build. “It was definitely tough to stay motivated sometimes,” Anthony says. ![]() “There wasn't much information to go on, so we spent hours looking for indie musicians across the UK who shared the same first names.” “There was only a handful of people at that time,” says Anthony, a UK-based fan, who joined early on and was involved in the hunt. A growing number of users had joined a dedicated Discord channel, set up by a fan based in Argentina going by the name of “Zod”. The beginnings of a cult following were developing across the world, as was an intense internet hunt to find Panchiko. It didn’t take long after that for discussions to start springing up across Reddit forums, Discord channels, private chats and YouTube. Another even offered to buy the EP there and then for £130.įor months, the EP bounced around online until it was picked up by a California-based YouTuber called sticki, who shared the original rip with his 10,000 followers. There was a comparison to “Bowie pop”, while one user believed the cover was an obscure reference to US hip-hop group Death Grips. Some thought it might be a sound effect, others said it was damaged, a few dismissed it as a bad recording. No one could come up with an explanation for the distortion. Within minutes of clicking “send”, the comments started rolling in. Excited by the prospect of owning a rare EP, the user took a punt to see if anyone could help. The only information was the band members’ first names listed on the back cover – Owain, Andy, Shaun and John – and the year the CD came out: 2000. “Even with super obscure bands, you might expect to find on an old Myspace page or a mention in some forum,” they wrote at the time. Searching online, they couldn’t find a single reference to Panchiko. Half expecting the main track – “D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L” – to be “noise pop or some vapourwave wankery”, they instead heard a lo-fi shoegaze track, with a curious distortion panning back and forth throughout the song. When they got home, the intrigue deepened.
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