As Pantha du Prince, Hendrik Weber's music is made up of sharp but delicate sounds, digitally sheared slivers of drum or bell that ring out crystal clear against the inky emptiness of his tracks. PdP records sound as if all of their percussion instruments are made of extraterrestrial glass and recorded in the vast hull of some abandoned starship. It is painstaking stuff, but the music unfolds as if it's alive rather than carefully cut-and-pasted, as if Weber were less programming beats than growing little self-directing universes in bottles. Even the occasional snatches of natural or industrial noise, which should remind you of the messy outside world, can't break the tracks' hermetic, otherworldly spell.
Pantha du Prince tracks are also very uniform, but that's no bad thing. When one works up a sonic signature that seems to allow for infinite (and inviting) small variations, you're wise not to abandon it too quickly. Which makes the new pseudonym, the restless dance producer's friend, all the more important, especially if that fresh moniker comes attached to a collaboration that prods the artist out of comfortable habits.
There are moments on Ursprung, Weber's casual, and sometimes casually brilliant, new project with Stephan Abry, one half of the krautrock-as-indie-pop act Workshop with the artist Kai Althoff, that recall Pantha du Prince, most especially the whirlpools of percussive noise that bubble up every so often. But while Ursprung retains Weber's organic minimalism-- this is an album of tiny gestures that seem to evolve of their own accord as much as be directed-- it mostly abandons his bright and glacial digital palette. The alternating warm and wistful, uneasy and muted tone of Workshop's guitar-band set-up is more in evidence, even if Ursprung strays far from "songcraft," however broadly you may define a song. As for even the most tenuous connection to dance music, forget it. The comforting tick-tock beats that drive much of Ursprung are there strictly for some semblance of structure, motorik rhythms dragged down to tempos DJ Screw might appreciate, even less interested in funk or forward momentum than Pantha du Prince's eddies of tinkle and clink.
Long stretches of Ursprung remind me of Jan Jelinek's underrated Kosmischer Pitch, another record where an avant-dance producer, known for building insular digital worlds out of unnatural sounds, gets his hands dirty merging live instruments with editing software, affirming that the hairy hippie history of Germanic art-rock somehow led to highbrow modern electronic music. Wanting to both (gently) engage you and to just trance out, Ursprung is ambient where the gnarled textures and spooked vibe keep you from being able to relax entirely, which is almost always the best kind of ambient. As is S.O.P., Weber and Abry cite Brian Eno as an inspiration point, but if so it's the haunted woodlands and abandoned beaches Eno conjured with On Land, rather than the soothingly inert repetitions of Music for Airports.
There's also a lot of guitar that actually resembles what 99% of humanity wants from a guitar, rather than a guitar used as a machine for generating sound washes, but don't go expecting a rock record. Sometimes on Ursprung we get Fahey-signs-to-Factory guitars, and sometimes we get Michael Rother-in-an-autumnal-mood guitars. So we're talking plangent-but-hypnotic grooves rather than the immediacy of riffs, and miniature jams that split the difference between pastoral meandering and freeform noodling. Affecting, but in a way that stirs what Robert Christgau once derisively called the "vaguer emotions." Ursprung's guitar sounds like a guy plucking strings, but they're still using it to conjure ambient's abstract moods. Maybe think Bon Iver's spacier stretches of fingerpicking, if Justin Vernon abandoned every last earthy hint of the blues.
The guitar work may seesaw between pleasant mindlessness and the mindfulness of a craftsman, but the album's production sounds like the work of two fully engaged brains. No idea how the workload was split, but the environment-creating detail and attention to goosebump-raising fluctuations in timbre and grain certainly feels like Weber. This mix of gauze and grit, ear-grabbing and wombing, is one of Ursprung's biggest draws, especially in a genre that too often tends toward formless gloop. Even when the melodic ideas feel undercooked, or almost drowned in pools of electronic haze, the guitars retain a fingers-on-frets tactility that's wonderful. And the electronic elements likewise have a crispness and snap that plays almost psychedelically again the tracks' gauzy aether.
Ambient's always had an uneasy relationship with traditional ideas of musical effort. (Get too interesting, and suddenly you're in a different zone entirely.) But the last few years have seen a lot of lazy reverb abuse, mushy beats, and mood muzak trying to pass itself off as exploratory music-making, from both the indie rock and electronic worlds. Weber and Abry are two brave souls in attempting reintroduce ideas, sometimes a positively bounteous three or four ideas per track, into a genre where eight minutes of a muddy synth loop gets you hailed as a genius. That they don't treat ambient as empty-headed fluff for relaxation is laudable, but it also doesn't make Ursprung any less of a record for a self-selecting coterie of sound-art aficionados. If you still require things like hooks, humor, and human emoting in your music, all that hard work may make you wonder where Ursprung could go if they applied this simultaneously bracing and blissed-out blend, the sun-warped woozy atmosphere and sharp detail, to an actual band writing actual songs. Maybe they can helm the next Real Estate album?
