For an album with a royal pedigree right there in its title, Prins Thomas' Principe del Norte is a record with nothing to prove. The shortest of its nine untitled tracks is nearly eight minutes long, and three run to 13 minutes or more. You don't get the sense the track lengths stem from any sort of desire to grandstand; it just looks like Thomas didn't much feel like editing himself. The whole album runs more than an hour and a half, beats halting and restarting, synths drifting willy-nilly over muted basslines, and arrangements wandering free as clouds. It is a vision of ambient music in bathrobe and slippers, slurping milk straight from the carton at the all-night grocery; it is The Dude of ambient.
Of course, the Dude was pretty cool, and so is Principe del Norte, which comes across as genial, charmingly rumpled, and totally unflappable. These songs appear to have been improvised and recorded across long studio jams, and the main compositional guideline seems to dictate only that the music is limited to what Thomas can play with his own two hands—or his sequencers—at any given moment. Take "C," which begins with patient, parallel synthesizer lines, teases with a pitter-pat beat, falls back into a beatless breakdown—mashed keys, a wrong note or two—and then ramps back up into its full chug. There's yet another false ending at the eight-and-a-half minute mark, before the arpeggios fire up again for a four-minute denouement.Disco's pulse is implicit in the four-to-the-floor beats of the album's heavier cuts ("E," "F," "G") and in faintly funky basslines that crop up here and there, but the album draws most of its inspiration from '70s German electronic artists like Tangerine Dream and Manuel Göttsching.
In his notes to the album, Thomas cites the influence of '90s ambient artists like the KLF, the Orb, and the Black Dog, but for the most part, Principe del Norte scans as a logical extension of Thomas' previous work, just with the drums dialed way down. The lone exception is the final track, "H," which might be one of the heaviest things he's ever recorded; with its thudding bass kicks, cavernous bass kicks, and monotone clatter and grind, it sounds almost like his attempt at Berghain-style techno. ("D," which uses some of the same elements, scans more as Thomas' interpretation of dub techno in the tradition of Chain Reaction.) Unlike proper warehouse techno, though, "H" retains all of Thomas' habitual characteristics—idiosyncratic, loosey-goosey, a little unkempt. Does anyone need 13-plus minutes of it? Perhaps not, but you don't come to Principe del Norte for concision. You come to kick back, get lost in Thomas' textures, and forget about time for a while. It's not music for airports; it's music for beanbag chairs, and that's just fine.
