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Air With Layers
Zhengtao Pan
Label: Pinch Records
Released: 2026
Views: 63
Tracks
Shattered Sky; Symphony No.1, I. Half and Half; Symphony No.1, II. Air With Layers; Symphony No.1, III. Raindrop That Falls; Piano Concerto No.1; Piano Concerto No.1, II; Piano Concerto No.1, III
Personnel
Zhengtao Pan
composer / conductorAdditional Personnel / Information
Performance by the Budapest Scoring Orchestra
Album Description
Zhengtao Pan, a US-based composer from Shanghai, will release his third studio album, Air With Layers, on January 30, 2026 to physical and digital platforms. On the Pinch Records label, the 22-year-old Pan will release his first fully orchestrated Symphony and Piano Concerto, along with a single due January 2, all in one album. Serving as his first dive into contemporary classical, the record proves the versatility of his musical craft and the fruits of his time at Berklee College of Music, the Gabriela Ortiz Composing Studio, and the Film Scoring Academy of Europe. Currently, Pan is enrolled in the Beal Film Scoring Institute at the Eastman School of Music.
Performed by the Budapest Scoring Orchestra, Air With Layers represents the composer’s desire to create an atmosphere of deeply personal music, one that is accessible to each of his audiences in the many genres he works within. “Every note tells a story in my music,” says Zhengtao Pan, “I became fascinated with incorporating silence and space… I want my music to live and breathe in the world, to be heard and appreciated by as many listeners as I can reach.”
In the summer of 2024, Zhengtao Pan attended the Ravinia Festival as a winner of the David Baker Prize and became acquainted with Billy Childs. What followed was enlightening advice about reckoning with composing for ‘academia’ versus composing for oneself; ultimately, Childs encouraged Pan to ‘destroy’ what he had learned and build something new and recognizable only as his own music. In answer, Pan’s third album includes the single Shattered Sky along with Symphony No. 1 and Piano Concerto No. 1, his first multi-movement style compositions.
While labeled as contemporary classical, it is clear upon first listen that Air With Layers overlaps classical, jazz, film, and video game music to craft a new atmospheric soundscape—one of Pan’s unique design. With breezes of seamless modulations, sliding strings like gusty torrents, and stratospheric melodic motifs, each track is a new ‘layer’ of this synthesis.
A grand-student of Toru Takemitsu (via his mentor at Berklee, Allen Levines), Pan’s impressionistic style of through-composition bears traits from the late composer. The strings, brass, and harp in Air With Layers embody this unpredictability, with fluttering notes as the changing direction of the winds and a delightfully temperamental orchestration as the inherent flux of the sky’s natural forces.
Zhengtao Pan’s discography consists of varied projects: classical, jazz, and big band arrangements for the Sonic Symphony Orchestra in Belarus, the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra and more ensembles; soundtracks for video games (Lost Soul Aside, Arknights, One Piece: The Bloodline) and short films/visual media (The Best Sword in the World; When The Sun Rises, The Moon Shines; Wormhole); and songs for VOCALOID and virtual singers (Ordinatio feat. Yan He, Serpent Curse feat. Yai Hi).
