PANTHA DU PRINCE & THE BELL LABORATORY

ELEMENTS OF LIGHT (Rough Trade)

15/20

With 2007’s This Bliss, Henrik Weber presented his vision of the dance full-length, consisting of a gorgeously realised world of shimmer and haze, mesmeric melodic miasma set to the lulling pulse of Kompakt style minimal. He returned in 2010 with the similarly coherent, pastoral melancholic Black Noise. The thing that set Weber apart from his tech-house-minimal-ballbearings-in-a-washing-machine bedfellows was simple: bells. Those glorious chimes. That Weber sticks to this bells’n’hushed-thuds formula on Elements of Light should come as no surprise, nor should it fill the potential listener with inertia. Why? Because the formula still works. From the languorous peals of opener Wave through to the sumptuous pointillist-ambient of closer Quantum, we’re offered a further glimpse into his soundworld; a place where muffled kicks and faltering hi-hats mingle with minutely-differentiated bell tones, summoning the endless iced-out landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer. Yet the lengthy Particle turns into a weirdly-robust heads-down percussive workout, the even lengthier Spectral Split embodies its title: a barely there sparseness melts into a full field of competing melodic fragments, leaving the listener saturated in Weber’s deep-blue tones.

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Words: Josh Baines