Arriving as it did at the end of January, Pantha Du Prince’s second album This Bliss just felt right.
Hendrik Weber’s delicate, detailed techno was a tonic against the miserable weather. Break the individual components down, and it’s easy to understand the record’s charm: it’s full of evocative melodies and filmic strings.
If Weber knows why his album has proved so popular, he’s not telling. Asked about the influences that shape his music, he replies: “The album is a product of process, and my surroundings are included in that. But my surroundings are not the basis of my work. It's a pictorial reflection from within, and not from the outside.”
The 32-year-old (“my passport says I’m born in 1975, but once a guy in Mexico told me I’m a very old spirit”) has been steeped in music since he was a child, learning piano with his mother.
He plays bass in a German band called Stella, and hopes to return to it when he can (“I still love that instrument”). The seeds of Pantha Du Prince were sown in the mid-’90s.
He says: “I started making electronic music in 1998. But before that, I was working with mixer feedbacks and effects, if you count that. I also learned to use synthesizers and computers from different experimental and new music artists in collaborating with them at music school.”
Asked what inspires him, Weber gives a very long list: Bach, the woods in the middle of Germany, Bruno Dumont movies, the North Sea, noise pop, John Cage.
Speaking about his contemporaries, he is more succinct: “What was really important for me was the founders of Kompakt and the founders of Chain Reaction/Basic Channel as well as the great people behind Mego and Säkö records.”
And then there's Dial Records, the Hamburg label that's also home to his sonic soul brothers Efdemin and Lawrence.
“It's a small collective of friends and producers who help each other give their music to the world.”