‘Black Noise’ has the classiest opening sequence of any album in a long time. The first three tracks coolly redefine the genre of ambient Techno in glorious, glacial panavision.
‘Lay In A Shimmer’ sets the scene, opening up your ears with an infeasibly spacious ringing tone. ‘Abglanz’ manages to increase that feeling of utter spaciousness and leaves you floating before ‘The Splendour’ introduces a new, instantly touching melodic theme and underpins it with a megalithic bass.
‘Black Noise’ also sees Pantha sticking out feelers into the Indie camp. Noah Lennox of US band Animal Collective contributes lead vocals on the poppy ‘Stick To My Side’.
Watch The ‘Stick To My Side’ Video!
But ‘Black Noise’ offers more than ambient bliss. With the dancers in mind, Pantha steps up the beats on’Behind The Stars’and builds up the anticipation during the muted drama that is ‘Bohemian Forest’ to explode gently into the shimmering minimal groove of ‘Welt Am Draht’. Awesome as a sequence and in isolation as indvidual tracks. I can play ‘Welt Am Draht’ (World On The Wire) two, three times a night and always pack the floor.
Throughout all of its eleven tracks ‘Black Noise’ possesses a sense of near infinite space and almost earpiercing clarity. Delve in deeper and you will note a wistful, almost melancholic note. The source material for this album certainly lends itself to speculation of subconscious vibes influencing the finished tracks.
‘Black Noise’ is based on field recordings made in the Schuttwald, literally ‘forest of rubble’, that was created when a landslide wiped out the entire Swiss alpine village of Atzmaennig in 1816. Hendrik Weber and his partners in crime, Joachim Schuetz and Stephan Abry, played and recorded various prepared instruments on location which, judging by the photos that grace the album’s packaging, is an impressive testament to nature’s force and rather spooky.
Pantha Du Prince - Black Noise album trailer from Rough Trade Records on Vimeo.
Weber’s experience as a musician, he played bass in celebrated Hamburg indie band Stella before catching the Techno bug, brings a vivid, ‘live’ feeling to the album which goes beyond standard Techno or electronic fare. As a result, ‘Black Noise’ achieves a sense of grace in its juxtaposition of delicate acoustic sounds and computerised foundation - or ‘Bells and Bass’. You just couldn’t do that on a laptop, mate.
Fans of Minimal Techno or the Berghain sound will love ‘Black Noise’. But even if you have mixed feelings on electronic music in general or Techno in particular it’s an album that is well worth a listen because of its genre-defying grace. In my opinion, ‘Black Noise’ is clearly one of the key albums of 2010.
