Pantha du Prince - Glühen 4
Pantha du Prince - English / German
Fishing in the morning, philosophising in the evening: Hendrik Weber has updated Marx's communism in everyday life. After getting up, he turns his life into an analogue artpiece and when going to bed, he manipulates digital data streams.
You may already know him as "Panthel" or "Glühen 4" and as a satellite rotating around the Hamburg-based DIAL label and Indiehouse scene. Hendrik Weber's current and probably most influential project is "Pantha du Prince". In 2003, he released the radically introverted debut album "Diamond Daze": it represents purest sublime physicalness and basically an awesome collection of Hendrik Weber's knowledge and experience in Indierock, New Music and Techno. It is great to see many different layers of a personal history displayed without any ambition of supersense. Though you will find some canonical references (to Detroit Techno, Theo Parrish, Moodyman, Acid House or to good-old Techno "smasher"), in fact the basic vocabulary of Techno and House is constantly enriched and contaminated by alien word fragments. But interferences are welcome and you must not underestimate neither the influence of Noisepop (My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, A.R. Kane) nor the influence of Electronic Music, Minimalism or Folk on the sometimes psychedelically wobbling sounds from Pantha du Prince. Each reference speaks its own language, and just like life, each influence is multiplied and boundaries get blurred. This layering of sounds and moods produces somewhat bizarre effects as every single layer reveals another one. There is neither any centre, nor any "Does and Don'ts". Hendrik Weber loves to break up functionalities and traditional sound structures. And not to forget this unforgiving melancholy that plays a vital part in all his sounds.
However, you will never have the feeling that a vain sovereign governs the archives. Hendrik Weber does not feel this pressure for self-expression or external manifestations (such as affectations in posture and dress) like other artists in the Techno and House scene do. He rather sticks to the wobbly boundary between Does and Don'ts, control and lavishness, ego and excess. Doubt or nescience may allow gorgeous things to happen. Sometimes, music knows more than its producer and this diving into the Ocean of Sound may also be called "digital romanticism". During Hendrik Weber's live performances as "Pantha du Prince" however, you will experience a completely different version of this vague attitude. Instead of acting the self-confident shaman, Hendrik Weber throws his sounds at the audience with an active-passive nonchalance and makes "it" happen: he always leaves enough space for uncontrollable oscillations and at the best moment, Hendrik Weber succeeds in creating this "other space" within a real space (club, bar, public living room) which Michel Foucault defines as "counter-positions or points of resistance" – "effectively realised utopia in which all the real arrangements that can be found within society and culture, are at one and the same time represented, challenged and overturned". Weber's bizarre performance at this "sort of place that lies outside all places and yet is actually localizable" reminds of David Bowie, Andy Warhol and Samuel Beckett's theatre: Why these weird gestures towards the laptop screen? Does he want to appease the invisible data streams and prevent them from getting out of control? Or is it just a little pea hidden under the keyboard? And then Hendrik Weber's nervous elegance – damned sexy and glamourous. But be careful: the desire for the ultimate effect, for this special moment of salvation when "the bass drum leaves, and the holy spirit arrives" is only slightly triggered, but never fulfilled. Though Hendrik Weber wanders in a multi-functional way between Avantgarde and rush, noise and rave, he is reluctant to fulfil popular expectations for instant excitement. Nothing is in fact more boring than the foolproof shortage of unlimited possibilities music has to offer...and thus, nothing ever gets stuck and is soon directed in a completely different direction. And all works out nicely then! Hendrik Weber is a rebel against the topography of entertainment terror. But he offers millions of other streams of desires instead. It is all about this sudden, unprogrammed bliss that Marx would call the "Kingdom of Freedom".
Aram Lintzel, December 2004
This Bliss - English / German
At home, he is a tourist. We are talking about Hendrik Weber - DJ, producer, composer, furniture maker - who keeps on exploring new worlds of sound under his pseudonyms Panthel, Glühen or as bassist of Hamburg-based group Stella. And finally again under Pantha du Prince. After remixes for Depeche Mode or phantom/ghost and releases of "two of this summer's most wonderful hits" (according to a review written by bleed in de:bug magazine on "Lichten/Walden"), his new album is out now: here is "This Bliss" - a record that again acts both at the heart and at the boundaries of House and Techno music. It was produced here and elsewhere, on trips, while visiting friends, on the train, the airplane or when travelling between Hamburg, Berlin, New York and an old Parisian monastery. Expressed in terms of the currently popular discourse jargon: Pantha du Prince's second album after "Diamond Daze" (2004) can rightly be called "nomadic" as the final product reflects the mobile production situation.
The bunker images in the booklet, taken from Paul Virilio's book "Bunker Archeology", may give a wrong impression. In fact, "This Bliss" has nothing at all to do with a bunker. As usual, invasions and emissions are welcome and appreciated. Pantha du Prince deliberately employs ambiguity to blur the lines between technology and communication, thus keeping the heart of "This Bliss" constantly in motion and producing either centrifugal or pulling forces according to the ambience and conditions. Moments of peace and tranquility are hard to find, even if the bass drum is not the boss anymore. "This Bliss" sounds like a trip to the end of the world (and the night); the sound bites either ramify in dreamy ornaments or disperse in glittering sound sparks (obviously, a spooky stalactite cave served as the perfect sound model for this sophisticated work).
Also inspired by esoteric minimalist Wim Mertens, Pantha du Prince has managed to pull out all the stops when it comes to beauty. Ornament as a promise then? Well, sometimes, but somehow, these vagabonding fragments manage to catch the decisive moment and concentrate into precarious intensities. The sophisticated and minimal track "Moonstruck", a homage to Terry Riley, is definitely a club track. However, we must not forget that for the traveller "Departure" always means saying goodbye. Despite of the hit tunes and the clear destinations (Detroit, Moodymann, Minimal, Acid or the smooth and smashing track), the read thread that seems to hermetically hold "This Bliss" album together is the mood of rigid melancholy inherent in each track. "Walden II" and its displayed inwardness sounds like a lecture in negative dialectics for the club. What a promising yet at the same time doubting emphasis: a fragile and ambiguous flow is constantly threatened with disappearance. A track on "This Bliss" is programatically entitled "White out": instead of using fade-outs like on "Diamond Daze", cross-fading and overexposure techniques were used to create a feverish, flickering atmosphere. There is too much light on this white, flat land; everything becomes nothing, like in the absence of light.
In this striking glariness, outlines become blurry, seem to dissolve, and indistinct become heaven and hell. "Black out" / "White out" - where is the difference? In this uberbrightness, each movement freezes into a speedy standstill. For Pantha du Prince, this freezing offers both, romantic as well as conceptual qualities: an inward hallucination develops in reverse order - at midday, and not at midnight. There is neither difference, nor any precise instructions: "Silent War" is how Hendrik Weber describes the zone where chaos and order, war and peace, silence and noise merge together. The track "Eisbaden" is more a movie soundtrack that accompanies this disorienting experience for body and mind. The way Weber uses unknown material blurs the boundaries between inside and outside, between self and others. "Saturn Strobe" is a cover version of a track from contemporary composer Robert Skempton. But due to the reversed phases, the strings do not remind of the original version anymore, but rather of a surreal invention. For "Steiner im Flug", a will-o'-the-wisping homage to Werner Herzog's movie on the bizarre ski jumper Steiner, Pantha du Prince used microscopic micro elements from the soundtrack by composer Popol Vuh. "Seeds of Sleep" tries to blur the limits between the sound concepts of Neu! and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.
Will all this knowledge on private mythologies really help find your way in the crystal worlds of Pantha du Prince? Knowledge does not always mean power and beauty cannot be summarized. But the moment cognition stops, everything else will start.
Aram Lintzel, September 2006
