>> Pantha Du Prince
bio: Fishing in the morning, philosophising in the evening: Hendrik Weber has updated Marx's communism in everyday life. After getting up, he turns his life into an analogue artpiece and when going to bed, he manipulates digital data streams.
You may already know him as "Panthel" or "Glühen 4" and as a satellite rotating around the Hamburg-based DIAL label and Indiehouse scene. Hendrik Weber's current and probably most influential project is "Pantha du Prince". In 2003, he released the radically introverted debut album "Diamond Daze": it represents purest sublime physicalness and basically an awesome collection of Hendrik Weber's knowledge and experience in Indierock, New Music and Techno. It is great to see many different layers of a personal history displayed without any ambition of supersense. Though you will find some canonical references (to Detroit Techno, Theo Parrish, Moodyman, Acid House or to good-old Techno "smasher"), in fact the basic vocabulary of Techno and House is constantly enriched and contaminated by alien word fragments. But interferences are welcome and you must not underestimate neither the influence of Noisepop (My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, A.R. Kane) nor the influence of Electronic Music, Minimalism or Folk on the sometimes psychedelically wobbling sounds from Pantha du Prince. Each reference speaks its own language, and just like life, each influence is multiplied and boundaries get blurred. This layering of sounds and moods produces somewhat bizarre effects as every single layer reveals another one. There is neither any centre, nor any "Does and Don'ts". Hendrik Weber loves to break up functionalities and traditional sound structures. And not to forget this unforgiving melancholy that plays a vital part in all his sounds.
However, you will never have the feeling that a vain sovereign governs the archives. Hendrik Weber does not feel this pressure for self-expression or external manifestations (such as affectations in posture and dress) like other artists in the Techno and House scene do. He rather sticks to the wobbly boundary between Does and Don'ts, control and lavishness, ego and excess. Doubt or nescience may allow gorgeous things to happen. Sometimes, music knows more than its producer and this diving into the Ocean of Sound may also be called "digital romanticism". During Hendrik Weber's live performances as "Pantha du Prince" however, you will experience a completely different version of this vague attitude. Instead of acting the self-confident shaman, Hendrik Weber throws his sounds at the audience with an active-passive nonchalance and makes "it" happen: he always leaves enough space for uncontrollable oscillations and at the best moment, Hendrik Weber succeeds in creating this "other space" within a real space (club, bar, public living room) which Michel Foucault defines as "counter-positions or points of resistance" – "effectively realised utopia in which all the real arrangements that can be found within society and culture, are at one and the same time represented, challenged and overturned". Weber's bizarre performance at this "sort of place that lies outside all places and yet is actually localizable" reminds of David Bowie, Andy Warhol and Samuel Beckett's theatre: Why these weird gestures towards the laptop screen? Does he want to appease the invisible data streams and prevent them from getting out of control? Or is it just a little pea hidden under the keyboard? And then Hendrik Weber's nervous elegance – damned sexy and glamourous. But be careful: the desire for the ultimate effect, for this special moment of salvation when "the bass drum leaves, and the holy spirit arrives" is only slightly triggered, but never fulfilled. Though Hendrik Weber wanders in a multi-functional way between Avantgarde and rush, noise and rave, he is reluctant to fulfil popular expectations for instant excitement. Nothing is in fact more boring than the foolproof shortage of unlimited possibilities music has to offer...and thus, nothing ever gets stuck and is soon directed in a completely different direction. And all works out nicely then! Hendrik Weber is a rebel against the topography of entertainment terror. But he offers millions of other streams of desires instead. It is all about this sudden, unprogrammed bliss that Marx would call the "Kingdom of Freedom".
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