Bleep

For all his club-ready beats, Pantha Du Prince records are tender and gentle things replete with organic sounds - thumb-pianos, marimbas, field recordings. On his new LP Conference Of Trees we find Pantha Du Prince throwing his arms open to the natural world. As the title suggests, trees are at the centre of this album - Pantha Du Prince even said that, in creating this music, he wished to “become a tree myself and enable a group of musicians to become trees as well”.

Conference Of Trees is bookended by two lengthy drone numbers that do away with any notion of danceability. ‘Approach In A Breeze’ and ‘Lichtung’ are beatific and contemplative and could have been designed for meditation. After the glorious sprawl of ‘Approach In A Breeze’ we are delivered a handful of tracks which show a clear influence of John Hassell’s fourth-world ethos. It is not until Conference Of Trees’ fourth entry that we hear a beat, and even then the drums on ‘When We Talk’ are lullaby-soft.

The run from ‘Roots Making Family’ to ‘Pius In Tacet’ features a host of club cuts which will certainly satisfy long-time Pantha Du Prince fans. However, while these tunes will mix well with something by Axel Boman or DJ Koze, they also share that considered sense of harmony with nature, with the music of the spheres, as Conference Of Trees’ more weightless numbers.

Despite being best-known as a composer of electronic music, Pantha Du Prince’s work has always had an earthy feel to it. This becomes even more prominent on his gorgeous, ruminative, warm new album Conference Of Trees.