Until last year's Rough Trade-released Black Noise, I had a difficult time thinking of Pantha du Prince as a normal artist. Minimal electronic music, mind you, is not rock when it comes to larger-than-life presences: Most of these guys look like bike messengers with better connections at the Apple store. But Pantha, who to that point had released two albums of bell-laden, dreamlike productions, seemed more like a techno vampire (I'll admit that his spooky/scary haircut had something to do with this). To date his peers have treated his work like you'd treat a historical structure: hands-off. Remixes and collaborations have been thin on the ground; for the most part, we aren't used to hearing Pantha's singular style deconstructed.
This is partially because Pantha is so completely out of step with electronic music trends. His work for the Dial label could loosely be considered "minimal," a style whose prominence was already fading in 2007 when Pantha broke through with his much-loved This Bliss. We heard what happens when foreign bodies are introduced to Pantha's music on last year's Panda Bear collaboration, "Stick to My Side": The normally serene Noah Lennox sounded like a bull in a china shop amidst Pantha's compulsively orchestrated beauty.
XI versions of Black Noise collects the various remixes that trickled out last year and adds several more for good measure. "Stick to My Side" features prominently, as no fewer than five artists take a swing at a track that dripped with potential but ultimately fell flat. If there's a lesson in XI versions, it's just how deft a touch it takes to grapple with Pantha's idiosyncrasies. Pantha has talented friends though, and the vast stylistic range of the remixers here helps compensate for the fact that they hardly cast a wide net for their source material.
It's encouraging when the big names come out throwing punches. Four Tet takes "Stick to My Side" and surrounds Lennox's voice with the type of psychedelic curlicues he uses himself. Animal Collective take on the shifting, sighing "Welt Am Draht" and suffuse it with sour, humid vocals. Efdemin adds a backbone to "Stick", suppressing Lennox's vocals until they just barely peek through his smokey tech-house. Walls strip "Stick" of much of its beatific pulse and turn it into a hazy church song (or, roughly: a Panda Bear track). Others are less successful. Moritz von Oswald and Lawrence (one of Pantha's few distinct contemporaries) take on "Welt" and "Stick", respectively, but both offer more linear, soft-focus house variations that feel a bit mushy.
As such, XI versions works best as a companion for smitten Black Noise fans, and it offers a couple of nice moments that Four Tet and Animal Collective completists might want to keep in their back pockets. XI versions doesn't work as a full-length, but it still comes off as a curious win for Pantha (who, remember, didn't actually contribute any new music here), showing both how potently his work can be refashioned and how difficult it is to do so. Those whose interest was piqued by Black Noise are encouraged to seek out This Bliss or the rewarding works by Lawrence and von Oswald (as Maurizio). No one here fully owned Pantha's intricate castles of sound, but it's refreshing to hear them try.
