PANTHA DU PRINCE “THE TRIAL” (ROUGH TRADE)
Pantha du Prince’s The Trial is the German techno auteur’s first fully solo record in six years, but it’s being touted as his most collaborative effort yet. This might suggest an almost desperate determination to inject freshness and vitality into the project after such a long time away, or hey, maybe the guy was just busy doing other things for a while and felt like assembling a production squad? Whatever the case, it’s had a pronounced effect on the sounds he’s ended up pulling together on this genuinely lovely new LP.
Pantha, or Hendrik Weber as he’s more officially known, recruited DJ extraordinaire / Panda Bear affiliate Scott Mou, Norwegian experimental composer Bendik Kjeldsberg, and a strand of rotating others to comprise his band for The Trial’s sessions, deliberately imposing a jammier, more holistically human streak on the creation of the work. And there is a real sense of a band’s kind of jam-logic dictating the songs’ structures here, as opposed to say, the somewhat limited intuition of an electronic producer working alone in a bedroom studio. You can hear this from the get-go, as the pulsating beat of opening track The Winter Hymn takes its time unfolding over one of Weber’s trademark twinkly ambient soundscapes, before proceeding to thrum hard against a markedly natural-sounding rhythm section. Plus there’s a human voice busting out a falsetto over the top of the whole thing, and you can’t get a much more human sound than that.
The rest of the record’s first half seems to have some leftover traces of both 2010’s Black Noise and Weber’s collaborative 2013 LP with The Bell Laboratory buzzing around in its loins, what with all the mid-tempo beats, lighthearted idiophones, and melodically restless basslines, but it’s more like an extrapolation of all those ideas than a rehash. You What? Euphoria! embodies the fun-meets-darkness aesthetic that Black Noise was all about, but there are amplified amounts of finicky little sounds gently drifting around like little columns of non-toxic stardust. Following this, In An Open Space and Chasing Vapour Trails represent some of the most gratifyingly hypnotic work in the Pantha catalogue.
The Trial’s second side brings out even more of Weber’s deep-seated artistic eclecticism, with Lichterschmaus acting as a fluorescent, cheeky semi-colon before the distinctly dark Berlin techno vibe of Dream Yourself Awake takes over. Then, all you can do is brace yourself for psilocybin-tier psychedelia of the record’s final twenty minutes. Islands In The Sky is, at the very least, a completely surreal experience, featuring sung descriptions of some kind of weird, cataclysmic weather event, and closing track Wallflower For Pale Saints is a sweet ambient drifter comprised almost completely of effected guitar and vocals. I challenge you to not feel overwhelmed by this album by its end – because it’s legitimately huge.
But that’s not to say you won’t feel stunned into the kind of medium ecstasy any person feels after they’ve listened to a truly good album. There’s never any shortage of depth and nuance to Pantha du Prince’s work, and The Trial kicks that all into overdrive. It’s almost exhaustingly large in its scope, and reveals itself very slowly. So it might not replicate the explosiveness of Black Noise or his earlier releases, but this album exhibits an artist who’s maturing and becoming even more comfortable with his unusual style and experimenting with unusual methods as time goes by.
