Pantha du Prince — The Splendour (Rough Trade, 2009)
Whatever you say about the British record-buying population, you can never knock their enthusiasm.
Just as the chart-influencing plebeians have promoted acts such as the Crazy Frog and the Fast Food Rockers, the valiant population of our proud nation have now taken it upon themselves to topple Dr Cowell’s evil, Sony-backed pop-monopoly by buying a song backed by… er… Sony.
Well, I’m sure the Zapatistas of Mexico and the 30 million below the US poverty line, who Rage Against the Machine once passionately and poetically protested for, will be glad the music — which has long since been an anthem to white, middle class, teenage door slamming — is finally achieving some good.
Anyway, while this saga has been going on with dauntless abandon, there has been some bloody good music being released.
‘The Splendour’
Fans of German minimal techno blippery will be excited to hear that Berlin and Paris-based artist Pantha du Prince, traditionally affiliated with Hamburg’s deep house label, Dial Records, is releasing a new record through Rough Trade on February 8.
The record, Black Noise, features some exciting collaborations — namely Noah Lennox of Panda Bear and Animal Collective and Tyler Pope of and LCD Soundsystem, who plays bass on new single, The Splendour, which was released on December 14.
If this single (which you can download legally, for free, here) is anything to go by, the album will be an utter treat. It begins with the kind of atmospheric, organic stuttered clunks and whirrs which notoriously characterised Aphex Twins’ Drukqs. The beat which comes in is subtle yet perfectly weighted. It evokes that peculiar, welcome loneliness often induced by such sonic material.
Hendrik Weber, as Pantha du Prince is known to his friends, describes his mission as “to render audible what is unheard and unheard of: black noise, a frequency that is inaudible to man. Black noise often presages natural disasters, earthquakes or floods; only some animals perceive this.”
Although this may sound like an ambitious — pretentious even? — pitch, the way the music builds certainly has an ethereal quality to it.
My knowledge of techno is reasonably limited (far more limited than many of my friends anyway, who’ll no-doubt lambast me for my Zane-Lowe-depth on the subject!). However, I’m looking forward to February, when Black Noise is released, probably as much as Joe McElderry is looking forward to February — when this whole X-factor/RATM debarcle has blown over and we’ve forgotten he ever existed.
