German techno producer Pantha Du Prince has just released his new album The Triad, and it’s another production that chimes and glistens in all the right places.
The Triad is the follow-up to Hendrik Weber’s 2013 album with The Bell Laboratory, Elements of Light, which took his obsession with digital tinkles and shimmers to its logical conclusion – a collaboration with a group of bell-ringers, his minimal techno sheen pitter-pattering around a three-tonne carillon and its various bells.
The Triad features further collaboration, with members of The Bell Laboratory and singer Scott Mou aka Queens, as well as abstract floaty vocals from Weber himself. He sums it up as: “Black Noise was very much about me being alone in a small room in Berlin and composing. The Triad opens the structure to more human ways of interacting, not digitised ways of interacting… I wanted to cut through the digital dust that surrounds us.”
In An Open Space is a lot warmer than the regal beauty of Black Noise, but it’s no less intricate. It’s got a woozy falsetto vocal hook that recalls Apparat, lovely hissy snares and delicate metallic tinkering that chases the bass pulse around. It’s kind of obscene to use the word ‘exquisite’ to describe techno, but this is exquisite. Not sure what he’s getting at with the video though – part three-man pagan ritual, part silver-faced cyborg love-in.
Pantha Du Prince is playing this year’s Electric Picnic with the slightly aloof billing ‘Presents The Triad’, so that’ll be one of the essential highlighter ticks. I’ve seen him play a few times – notably a gleaming afternoon hangover cure at DGTL festival in Amsterdam last year, and with The Bell Laboratory at Primavera in 2013, a performance that coaxed every last goosebump off my skin. I’ve got no hyperbole left after dropping the ‘exquisite’ bomb, but it’ll be pretty special.
(Main featured image by Asha Mines)
Original version on buzz.ie
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