It’s been nearly 50 years since fate led teacher and musician Felix Rohner from Bern down a new path. Felix was at the Bern city festival on that day in September 1976. “The Bern Hotel Association had gifted the city a performance by a music band.” Performing was a steel band: musicians from a small island off the coast of Venezuela, playing on old oil drums and enchanting the people of Bern. “On this day, a new sound came to Bern – a new mood,” says Felix Rohner. 

Felix was so enchanted by this mood that he decided to act immediately and founded his own steel band the very next day, calling it the “Berner Ölgesellschaft” (Bern Oil Company). “In 1979 we were even allowed to open the Gurten Festival,” he explains. “We soon played at many festivals with our self-made steel pans and filled the streets of Bern with sound. We played what we felt and what we wanted to play. At that point, we didn’t even really know where Trinidad was. I only visited the island 13 years later.” 
The enthusiasm for playing on old oil drums wasn’t limited to Felix Rohner in Bern at the time. “Between Bern and Zurich, many people wanted to play in a steel band. Either they built instruments themselves under my guidance or they bought them.”

 

Felix and Sabina: dedicated to resonating metal

But soon, a problem emerged. “If you get really into playing with these old oil drums, they go out of tune,” explains Felix. Through his connections with the steel band scene in England, he had the opportunity to learn about the role of the tuner and its central importance in a steel band. He immersed himself in the world of steel band music and became a tuner – a creator of captivating sounds from drum barrels and the tuner for many Swiss steel bands that emerged in the 1990s. 

The result of this career choice is clearly visible today, nearly 50 years later. In Bern, slightly outside the city and right next to the Aare river, stands the workshop of PANArt. In the bright space with high ceilings, knocking sounds can regularly be heard. On shelves along the walls stand various musical instruments; there’s little to be seen of the old oil drums as played in Trinidad. Instead, the instruments look more like small UFOs. 
“We wanted to create our own story, driven by the impulse from Trinidad but with different sounds. They should be softer and less aggressive, and everyone should be able to play the instrument – regardless of age or gender.” 

By “we,” Felix also means his partner Sabina. She and Felix met in a steel band. “There weren’t many tuners back then – actually only Felix – so I started learning too,” says Sabina. 
She guides us through the various developmental stages of the instruments she and Felix have built. Often, the two failed because the material didn’t behave the way they wanted it to. “We contacted barrel manufacturers and got drums from them for our experiments, but at a certain point, we gave up on the barrels – the Swiss steel bands had too aggressive a playing style, which made the steel pans go out of tune quickly,” she explains, laughing.

 

The first blank is created 

The two worked hard and eventually produced their first blanks, from which sound objects were formed. “A lot of material was simply too soft,” explains Felix Rohner. He even teamed up with a locksmith to learn how the metal industry hardens such material. The musician and his partner also delved into scientific literature to improve their instrument. The solution after a long search: nitrogen to harden the material. “We connected the magical sound world of the steel pan with science, and from that, our Hang was born.” Thanks to a joint research project with the Biel University of Applied Sciences, a patent was filed for the new material – a composite. 
Today, Sabina and Felix offer various sound sculptures – as they call their works. “But the basic framework is actually always the same: a spherical network of sounds, called the Plexus, is held by a counterform. In terms of sound: among the many parameters that define our art, a few are important to us. They result in the typical and unique sound of our instruments. But at the end of the day, every Hang is different,” explains Sabina.

The first copies appear 

The instruments from PANArt are becoming increasingly popular. In 2004, as the internet steadily gained popularity, demand for the Hang exploded. Customers from both Switzerland and abroad came to Bern. But it wasn’t just end customers who took notice of the Hang – soon, music stores did too. “We had triggered something we never expected,” says Sabina. 
They wouldn’t have minded having competition in the business, as they couldn’t meet the overwhelming demand. “Mistakenly, we thought the competition would go about things the way we did,” explains Felix. “We thought they would be inspired by our work and develop something of their own.” 

But it often happened that poorly made instruments were sold under the name Hang. “People would then come to us for tuning, and we couldn’t help them,” explains Felix. “This is about the appropriation of our story,” adds Sabina. The two have already gone to court to defend their copyright on the Hang – and won. 

“For us, it’s mainly about our customers, who want to be able to distinguish a Hang from a copy. We’ve even tried to reach settlements with the makers of copies, but unfortunately, without success,” says Sabina Schärer. 
All of this inevitably raises the question of how the people of Trinidad feel about these new instruments. “In 2000, we were invited to a conference on the steel pan in Trinidad,” says Sabina Schärer. “We wanted to inspire them too, so we brought all our sound works and traveled to the Caribbean by cargo ship.” 

As for the instrument from Bern, people in Trinidad have no objections. As Dr. Anthony Achong, physicist and steel pan researcher from Trinidad and organizer of the conference, said: “You gave a contribution to our story.”