Pantha Du Prince - The Triad

Pitchfork 80

Techno is often dismissed as clinical music, engineered for precision impact. But an irony of the genre—and one that Hendrik Weber, who records as Pantha du Prince, understands deeply—is that, though technical by definition, techno is most satisfying when you can feel the human inside the machine. This is the case with The Field’s analog loops and Ricardo Villalobos’ live samples; it’s what makes Holly Herndon’s cerebral experiments compelling and breathes life into Jon Hopkin’s chilliest compositions. Like those artists, the tension between organic and synthetic is at the core of Pantha du Prince’s work, from his minimal techno classics, Diamond Daze and This Bliss, to Black Noise, which saw Weber celebrating nature through field recordings and a collaboration with Panda Bear. You can hear it when Weber abandoned the trappings of the genre to experiment with a three-ton bell carillon, usually found in European cathedral towers, on Elements of Light, and it’s what makes The Triad, Pantha du Prince’s first solo record in six years, his most maximalist and emotional release to date.

Since the early '00s, Weber has evolved from monastic bedroom producer to an artist who prefers the company of friends, from Noah Lennox to The Bell Laboratory to Stephan Abry, with whom he created the duo Ursprung. In many ways, The Triad plays like the sum total of Pantha du Prince’s career thus far, uniting Weber's early minimalism with grandiose instrumentation and collaborative songwriting. Though The Triad is billed as a Pantha du Prince release, Weber has lots of help. Joining him are The Bell Laboratory's Bendik Kjeldsberg and Scott Mou, who performs as Queens. Together, the three musicians (and a handful of guests) act as the titular Triad, melding electronic compositions with all manner of analog synths (Synthi 100, ARP, CS-80), vocals, and live instrumentation.

As a result, The Triad sounds more like the work of a full band than one guy with a laptop, and it's better for it. Compositions unfurl slowly, starting as sketches before layers of instrumentation blanket one another in unpredictable ways. Weber makes expert use of the human voice throughout, treating his own and others' as additional sonic bricolage rather than the centerpiece of any given composition. Album opener “The Winter Hymn,” for example, begins with a beat, bells, and chimes, before vocals come to the forefront, thawing the track like morning sun on snow. On “Chasing Vapour Trails,” monotone vocals offer a playful counterpunch to the clamor of bells before the track's bouncy rhythm is joined by ragged guitar squalls for an effect reminiscent of Matthew Dear.

Speaking of bells and chimes, few producers have a better grasp of how to use them than Pantha du Prince. Even before his work using the bell carillon, Weber's palette relied heavily on metallic tones and percussive elements. On The Triad, these sounds blend fully into the DNA of the tracks—it's not a gimmick or a distraction, but the heart of the sound. The effect is simultaneously cooling (bells have a way of adding a chill to the production) and wholly organic. There's a tactile resonance to their sound that's inarguably physical, even when the sound is brittle or delicate, and when a track really goes for the dance floor (see: “You What? Euphoria!”) it hits all the harder.

Listening to a Pantha du Prince record is also a distinctly visual experience. His tracks have a way of enveloping the listener, invoking images of Arctic taigas, snow-capped mountains, rolling hills. Even Weber's track titles—“Islands in the Sky,” “In an Open Space”—ask to be taken as specifically visual experiences. Song titles even directly recall films: “Lions Love” is named after an Agnès Varda film, while “Frau im Mond, Sterne laufen” references a Fritz Lang dystopia. It's hard to say whether individual listeners will see the same things while listening to these tracks, but there is a distinctly synesthetic element to the music. The result is an album that creates its own world, one it feels like you could reach out and brush with your fingers.

Drowned In Sound 60

Weber's music and image craft an image of the producer as a reclusive hermit living somewhere deep in the mountains or forests, attempting to render his environment in sound. Weber is clearly indebted to this idea, especially having named a track 'Walden 2' in reference to Henry David Thoreau's living-in-the-woods classic Walden. Further continuing this theme are track titles like 'The Winter Hymn', 'Bohemian Forest' and 'Es Schneit' ('it snows' or 'it's snowing') and a series of Weber's press shots feature him winter coat-clad climbing through snowy wilderness. It is easy to see why this side of techno is popular amongst indie fans with these sorts of themes easily found in nature-worshipping acts like The Microphones or Bon Iver. Indeed, the ideal image in our heads while listening to Weber's music is often more of a cold winters day than a sweaty club. That being said I'm sure many of Prince's songs would go off in the club (particularly bangers like 'Satelite Snyper' and 'Satin Drone').

Pantha Du Prince's tracks are generally a blend of acoustic sounds (bells, percussion), propulsive techno drum programming, warm bass synths and large caverns of ambient synths. His sound owes much, as it is frequently remarked, to the vague impressionism found in the textures of shoegaze with treble instruments habitually used to generate a thick texture of noise. This time round, Weber has decided to make an increased use of vocals, perhaps after Panda Bear's star turn on Black Noise's 'Stick To My Side'. Roughly half the songs feature vocals which alternate between dreamy washed-out falsetto and more typical techno sprachgesang speak-singing.

Amongst the tracks themselves, it is the instrumentals which are generally the strongest. The vocals, at best, add nothing to the tracks and, at worst, are an irritating distraction. The vocal collaborators lack the strong sense of melody or tone that Panda Bear brought to 'Stick To My Side'. 'Chasing Vapour Trails' starts off beautifully, building complicated textures slowly out of drums and delay effects before the completely unnecessary addition of vocals stalls its momentum. 'Islands In The Sky' is probably the most vocal-heavy of all the tracks and for a while it pulls off its introspective gothic techno before a chord change painfully brings the vocals into the foreground where they wither in the light of day. Adding to the disappointment of the vocals on 'Islands...' is their slightly off intonation which means that multitracked vocals clash with each other and the rest of the track.

Despite this, each of the tracks has its enjoyable moments. An obvious highlight is 'Frau Im Mond, Sterne Laufen' which tweaks a strong motif as the track builds and changes around it while icy synths swirl around the beat. Many of the best tracks like 'Lichterschmaus' and 'You What? Euphoria!' end up being those that stray closer to a classic Pantha Du Prince sound while the experiments, like the Mogwai-ish 'Wallflower For Pale Saints', lack confidence.

Pantha Du Prince describes The Triad as 'about more human ways of interacting... about meeting up and jamming' and, in many ways, it does resemble something close to a jam session where unpolished but great ideas are worked out to be developed more fully later. ![Please enter...][102841]

The Guardian 60

(Rough Trade)

The German minimalist producer and stickler for a conceptual framework recently explained his ambition to “cut through the digital dust that surrounds us” with his new album, The Triad. Panther du Prince’s aim is to celebrate human interaction, jamming, even, in an age of GarageBand and disconnect. While this first solo album in six years is elevating, and intricate in its elegance and rhythmic propulsions, it remains uncluttered by the chaos of true, visceral emotion. Modular synths and other vintage analogue gear replace samples, and his vocals are more present than before, amplifying the theme of physical presence. In an Open Space has celestial shoegaze qualities, Frau im Mond, Sterne Laufen has the glacial finesse of Sigur Rós, while Islands in the Sky is almost indie: “You haven’t talked in over a year to me,” he sombrely sings, sounding like a worryingly poetic Twitter troll. “Your territory vanished and reappeared.”