'Elements Of Light': Pantha Du Prince & The Bell Laboratory

I was interested to read the following sentiment in a recent 'Wire' magazine article, by Derek Walmsley the other day.  The article was about Daniel Lapotin, (who records as Oneohtrix Point Never), but this relates, more generally, to the way much 'interesting' music is often both presented and discussed, (including in this blog), nowadays...

"When I first heard these records they touched on a thought that had been gestating for some time: that emotion is a scarce quality in underground music, where directness might be mistaken for simplicity or weakness.  Oddly, appeal to the emotions has also become scarce in the discourse around music.  From minimal drone to quiet improvisation to...rock, talking about the the emotional impulse behind them, and speculating on what human needs they might fulfil has become less common as music thinkers and critics buttress their ideas with genre-spotting and factual ephemera." [1.].

I know we live in a context-focussed Post Modern, er - context, but, for a while now, I've found myself wishing music journalists/reviewers would tell me a bit less about how a particular piece relates to external categories; more about how it actually sounds; and what emotional and imaginative stimuli it may furnish.  Here's my first attempt to address the matter in my own monthly music bulletins.  I've focussed on a particular piece that's currently entertaining me and followed it with a simple playlist of other, (related or unrelated), stuff that might give more clues about where my ears are at.  If not wholly emotional in tone, I hope my response is at least slightly more subjective in describing an imaginative sound world.  Of course, some context can still be useful so let's get that out the way first.

Hendrick Weber/Pantha Du Prince

Some Context:

The man behind the rather decadent Pantha Du Prince name is actually German Techno producer Hendrick Weber, who came to my attention via his previous album, 2010's highly acclaimed 'Black Noise'.  It was a lengthy, substantial meal of beautifully produced, ambient-ish Techno that, I found, required repeated listens at raised volumes to fully appreciate its attention to detail and subtle sophistication.  Dedication paid off and I now enjoy it immensely.

Pantha Du Prince & The Bell Laboratory

This year's 'Elements of Light' is a more overtly experimental, but also, a more approachable, shorter offering.  Indeed, it is nearer E.P. proportions, although its five pieces do flow together with the sense of an album-long journey.  Title tracks, 'Wave', 'Particle', 'Photon', 'Spectral Split' and 'Quantum' indicate an overriding theme of light physics but the music's most striking feature is Weber's integration of actual bells, played in real time, into his M.O.  Chimes, metallic clangs and Gamelan resonances recurred throughout 'Black Noise', so it's a logical enough development and grows out of a campanological collaboration undertaken at an Oslo festival in 2011.

Vegar Sandholt at The Carillon.  Now, That's a Keyboard!

For this recording, Weber imported an impressive 50-piece, 3-ton carillon, played by Vegar Sandholt, into his own studio.  Its sounds combine with the precision playing of five other Norwegian ringers and percussionists and his own electronic rhythms and ambiances.  The resulting music underlines Weber's primarily melodic take on Techno.  His rhythm patterns are well judged but tend towards functional underpinning rather than structural complexity for its own sake.  It's perfectly logical that he should employ bell sounds to his ends as they are, of course, simultaneously percussive and melodic.

I note that the original Bell Laboratories are where Max Matthews developed the first musical computer programs in the 1950s.

Pantha Du Prince & The Bell Laboratory On Stage

Response:

The album opens with 'Wave', a piece that is full of small-scale, tinkling chimes that justify the 'Glacial' and 'Alpine' epithets often applied to Weber's work.  These aren't the forbidding, Arctic signifiers of a producer like, say, Biosphere,  but evoke, rather, the glistening of snow crystals in bright sunlight or the drip-drip of melting icicles.  Indeed, there is little of the Midnight Sun about his music in general, and rather more of an Alpine meadow in the clear light of day.

'Wave' morphs seamlessly into what may be the album's strongest piece, 'Particle'.  For the first time we have a sense of Weber's Techno sensibilities as essentially organic sounds give way to busier, more mechanistic, contrapuntal chimes.  There is a clear sense of vigorously hammered metal and even the dissonant squeals of mechanical scraping.  It's a longer-form piece which evolves through a number of 'movements' and definitely suggests human activity rather than a natural context, be it pealing church bells, the ticking of clocks and other mechanisms, or the 'pots and pans' clatter of metal working or domestic tasks.  The initial introduction of electronic bass tones and programmed beats occurs several minutes in, is beautifully judged and thrillingly ushers in a heightened sense of propulsion.  It's the first intimation that there are passages on 'Elements of Light' where the beauty of bells and driving rhythms lock together into something far greater than a sum of parts.

... And That's A Drum Kit!

This to and fro between the organic and the clangingly metrical is maintained throughout 'Elements Of Light'.  It occurs again in the album's other long-form piece, 'Spectral Split' which evolves from subdued beginnings to eventually become, through insistent, pulsing bass, snappy beats and layered rhythms, the nearest thing the album has to a conventional, dance floor groove, (albeit one in which ecclesiastical bell ringers have discovered club culture).  It's as though the rising sun has first illuminated the uppermost mountain peaks before chasing shadows from the high valleys and ultimately illuminating the roofs and teeming streets of an Alpine Town.  Calm is restored as the album concludes with the subdued 'Quantum'.  It effectively bookends proceedings, echoing the opening track as miniature hand bell chimes subside back into silence, (and darkness), again.

Alberecht Durer, 'View of Trento', Watercolour, (With Other Media?), 1494

Although framed within the contemporary idioms of electronic tones and programmed rhythms, it's no mystery that the use of bell chimes throughout lends the entire piece an incongruous antique Romanticism, perhaps because the enthusiastic futurism once associated with Techno music no longer seems so appealing in a new century of uncertainty.  Such chiming sonorities are unmistakably centuries old and also feel totally European.  However hard I try, I'm unable to make a mental connection with the science of light as Weber apparently intended.  Instead, I prefer to fantasize it's 500 years ago and some intrepid Northern European traveller is breaking his journey in a Swiss town before descending from The Alps into Northern Italy.  I also recall Northern Renaissance landscape painting and, in particular, work by Durer and Altdorfer.

Alberecht Altdorfer, 'Danube Landscape With Schloss
Worth Near Regensburg', Oil On Panel, 1520-25

Pantha Du Prince seems intent on proving that contemporary electronica can tap sensibilities more varied than customary default settings of utopian/distopian S.F. or pure technology fetishism.  It's also refreshing to encounter a contemporary artist unafraid to engage with something as out-moded as Beauty.

Further Listening:

'Black Light', Pantha Du Prince

'Oblivion With Bells', Underworld

'Rifts', Oneohtrix Point Never

'Madrigals, Book 5', Claudio Monteverdi, Performed by Marco Longhini/Delitiae Musicae

'At The Sign Of The Crumhorn, Flemish Songs & Dance Music From The Susato Music Books', Various Composers, Performed by Convivium Musicum Gothenburgense/Sven Berger/Andreas Edlund

'Complete Lute Music, Volumes 1 - 4', John Dowland, Performed by Nigel North

'Junk Science', Deep Dish

'For The First Time In America', (Live Box Set), Costello & Nieve

'Pure Phase', Spiritualized (Electric Mainline)



[1]:  Derek Walmsley, 'The Games People Play', London, The Wire Magazine 348, February 2013