Monday, 01 March 2010 05:44

If you’ve ever seen Pantha Du Prince play live, or even in a photograph, you know that he’s a darkly romantic character: strikingly handsome, with tousled blond hair and an unnervingly direct gaze. Like a poster boy for Rick Owens, his outfits suggest a dandy who has traveled from the future to our time via a detour through the 19th century: his long black overcoat dusts his shins, the folds of fabric as fluid as his music.

It’s hard to know where Pantha Du Prince, the character, ends, and Hendrik Weber—which is how the Berlin musician is known in civilian life—begins.

When I meet Weber at his Kreuzberg studio, he doesn’t look much different from when I had seen him on stage at Krakow’s Unsound festival last fall. A black knitted cardigan, belted about the waist, hangs almost to the floor; a royal blue silk scarf is knotted tightly around his neck.

His studio looks like the typical artist’s garret, with an unmade bed like an island in a sea of bohemian bric-a-brac. Every corner of the room is covered with dusty vinyl LPs, musical equipment, books on philosophy, and scraps of avant-garde fashion.

Pantha Du Prince’s new album, ‘Black Noise’ (click here for the US edition, and here for the rest of the world), represents not just a continuation of the image the artist has created, but an intensification.

Sonically, it bears much in common with his previous two albums for Hamburg’s Dial label, ‘Diamond Days’ and ‘This Bliss’. Atop drum programming as dry and brittle as kindling, he drapes gauzy, suggestive layers of melancholic melodies; deep analog basslines are both driving and yearning. The result is an unlikely middle ground between pensive ambient music, and jacking, body-moving house.

It’s all swimming in his signature bell tones, which is not uncommon for a Pantha Du Prince record—or, for that matter, for many records by his Dial label mates Carsten Jost, Lawrence or Efdemin. “For a long time, we were totally into who gets the better bell sounds,” says Weber, laughing about the crew’s competitive instincts.

“I don’t know, I just can’t get away from the bell tones. You can see them here,” he says, handing over a massive bronze form so heavy, it seems better suited for anchoring sailboats than making music.

Pantha Du Prince, ‘Abglanz’

 

“We built this huge rack for them in the studio,” he explains. “You need very strong stands, because it’s six bells, normally. I take them for my live set sometimes.

“But they’re never in tune. They’re somehow in tune, but you have to tune everything around them. I didn’t want to leave the whole bell idea with this record. During my research for the album, for example, I discovered the carillon,” - a medieval contraption comprised of 23 or more bells, and played with a pedal keyboard.

“You had a lot of them in before World War II,” says Weber, “Tons and tons of bells all over Germany. But at the end of the war, they needed so much iron, they took the bells out of the churches and made tanks and weapons out of them. So you don’t have the bells any more, you don’t have the tradition. That’s probably a reason I’m so into it - I feel there’s this sense of lack around us.”

 

‘Black Noise’ is full of such absences. Weber recorded much of the source material for the album in the Swiss Alps, where he traveled with several musician friends to collect the field recordings that would serve as his musical raw material.

“We took our field recorders and started playing in the mountain with our kalimbas, like a really folky thing,” he says. “Basically, I wanted to have a folder with good sounds that told a story, with a certain context. That makes it more fun for me to work on a house album. I wanted the sounds to always lead back to these moments that you have—you remember certain walks, or that the stones looked a certain way.”

From a plaque in their mountain cabin, they learned that a nearby village had been destroyed by a landslide a century earlier—meaning that the rocks they were clacking together, to be sampled into drum sounds, were in effect gravestones. They had been roaming over ruins, an idea whose melancholic aspects immediately appealed to Weber, and gave his album its concept.

Weber believes in sampling as a kind of musical transubstantiation. “There are all these stories and fragments beneath the stones, which you can somehow take out. When you listen, in homeopathic doses, you listen to a story being told.

“It’s that whole idea of black noise,” the term for the vibrations felt by animals in the instant before an earthquake, inaudible to the human ear, “as something that you don’t hear, but you can perceive it, because it’s there. That’s what the whole album should be about: when you listen closely you hear stories that don’t need words to be told, but sounds.”

Pantha Du Prince, ‘Stick to My Side’

 

Interestingly, there are words on the new album, for the first time in Pantha’s discography. Noah Lennox, better known as Panda Bear, from the band Animal Collective, wrote lyrics and sings on ‘Stick to My Side’, the record’s standout track. It’s certainly the most immediate thing that Pantha Du Prince has ever done, which might help explain why the U.K. indie titan Rough Trade signed the album.

It’s part of my theory: the club is the forest of the city

Years ago, Weber met the members of Animal Collective when they turned up swooning in the front row for one of his live sets in New York. Forming a fast friendship with them, Weber ended up touring Europe as the band’s opening act; a collaboration was a logical next step.

“I sent Noah three tracks, and he chose one, which is now the first one on the album,” says Weber, referring to the instrumental ‘Lay In A Shimmer’. “But I decided that there was already too much going on in the track to have a voice as well.

“I tried to mix it, but the sounds and the voice were always colliding, they weren’t really fitting.” Instead, Weber wrote an entirely new track around Lennox’ vocals. Chalk it up to one of those happy accidents that sometimes happens during the creative process.

While it’s clearly a Pantha Du Prince track, the song’s long, undulating melody and cryptic lyrical refrains carry the music into newfound pop terrain, but without ever losing its focus on the dancefloor.

Pantha Du Prince, ‘Lay in a Shimmer’

 

Weber may take inspiration from musique concrete and continental philosophy, but ultimately it all feeds back into life-long passions for house music and the spirit of the nightclub. “I never think explicitly about the club,” says Weber, “But I know I try to push the borders in my head. I try to imagine what could work and not, and where you can go with what sounds.

“There is this track which was always a hit when I played it, ‘Sach Mal Baum’, and it’s really just made with prepared guitar and drum machine. It’s moving, shaky, minimal house—it’s weird and experimental, but it still has all the frequencies you need.”

So as radio-ready as ‘Stick to My Side’ may be, Weber says, “I think it’s very suitable for the club. It’s not just some story, ‘Blah, blah, blah,’ it’s this strange, surreal world that Noah’s creating, and it’s really suitable for the ritual situation of the club, where you end up being part of something, where something takes over you.”

 

The discussion of ritual brings us back to the bells. I ask if Weber’s story of the church bells being melted down at the end of the war might represent another kind of transubstantiation. Just as he extracts stories from the stones, perhaps his use of the bells is a means of reviving a kind of lost sonic ritual?

“…and then bringing that into the club, as well,” he agrees, finishing my sentence. “It’s part of my theory: the club is the forest of the city.” No wonder Weber, who grew up in a small town near the woods where the Brothers Grimm set their tales, feels so at home on stage, where he holds court like some contemporary fusion of Lord Byron and Prince Valiant. He pauses and smiles, savoring the idea. “The club is the forest of the city.”

Source: beatportal