Fireside Chat

Pantha du Prince

Rough Trade, Dial, Berlin

Born 1975 in Bad Wildungen in the middle of nowhere, a little boy used to day-dream sitting under the piano of his musician parents before he got occupied by indie pop and discotheques. Pantha du Prince is created by Kassel native Hendrik Weber who experienced techno and british pop (Ride, Happy Mondays) for the first time in this city. After the indie pop clubs closed their doors and Morrissey had nothing more to say, Weber went directly into techno's straight bass drum. That inevitably led him to the new frontier of electronica (Warp, Autechre etc.) as well as eventually to Hamburg's Dial Records, where a philosophical and romantic view on electronic dance and no-dance music is king. Pantha illuminates the dancefloor with his live sets for an audience of soul searching party-goers and creates beautiful and blissfully disturbing minimal techno with a knisterpop approach, to happily rave-away to, emphatically accompanied by Hendrik's self-programmed lucid video projections. His productions get praised by men and boys like Michael Mayer, Richie Hawtin and Martin L.Gore (P.d.P did a remix for Depeche Mode in 2005), Pantha remixed Bloc Party or Animal Collective and released The Splendour - a fine piece of fragile techno folklore - via Rough Trade Records. This man's a bliss.