PANTHA DU PRINCE

Garden Gaia is a part of Pantha du Prince’s ongoing exploration into the theme of ‘humans as nature’, a theme previously explored on his records Elements of Light (recorded with The Bell Laboratory) and 2020’s Conference of Trees.

There’s a song insideeach and every thing –andinsideevery state. And it exists, this joy-inducing primal frequency, this renownedsound wave thatcan penetrate bodies and move them to stasis. A stasis that maybring change.Since 2012 –that is, for an entiredecade –Hendrik Weber aka Pantha du Prince has dedicated himself to a comprehensiveproject that has long shined brighter thanhis other releases and which isnowreaching a tentativeartistic peak with Garden Gaia. After the album Elements of Lightin 2012, which was recorded with The Bell Laboratory, cameConference of Treesin 2020, this time as a solo venture. What unites these three albums is that Pantha du Prince has dedicated them to theme of “humans as nature” –in the sense thathumans unfold andflow out of their surroundingsas bodies. Pantha du Prince: “There are scientists who say that we humans are ocean that’s been folded together. My music is about raising consciousness, about describing the reality of life and the lost paradise through the means of music. It’s about entering a free space and developing a maximum degree of openness and sensitivity to our bodies –to our mental states and the atmosphere that surrounds us.It’s about mindfulness and a high level of awareness towards what’s happening around and within us. I’ve poured all of these experiences into Garden Gaiaas music. And that’s to be taken in the literal sense of ‘pouring,’ since we belong to a flowing process on this planet. Atree also flows into the air, just as it’s connected to other trees beneath the groundthrough currents of communication. Our lungs flow into our bodies. And asembryos,wewere flowing beings. The question is: to what extent can we adult humans continue to flow?”That said, Pantha du Prince doesn’t makemusicas a provocation. His tracks are founded upon the principle of empathy and the willingness to changethe system within us. It’s not about limitless growth or accumulation or overexploiting resources (including our own) but about a productive emergenceas an individual in the currentof the world.If we look at the fallen world around us thatistearing up at the seams or at war or the destruction of nature, at the increasingly toxic personal relationships between people, then we realize that the music of Pantha du Prince possesses revolutionary potential because it brings peace. It’s not by chancethat the album’s title refers to the mighty and wild goddess Gaia, who personifies the Earth and isone of the highest deities in Greek mythology.For the nine new tracks on Garden Gaia, Pantha du Prince has again expanded his musical vocabularyofelectroacoustic expression in a creative processthat is extremelycollaborative. Absurdly, these collaborationswith musicians living far apartwere in part inhibited bythe pandemic restrictions during the winter: Pantha du Prince sent finished tracks fromhis own

cocoon to musician friends all over the world and was open to their contributions.Pantha du Prince: “the provocative, the opinionated, and the sense of authority thatsays‘I know what’s best’ is something I wanted to do away withon Garden Gaia. Just as a gardenwantstogrowtowards the highest level of prosperity and fertility, I as an artist try to just let things happen, to let them be. If we observe carefully, we can leta lot of energy from others flow into our work. The outcomeisa different kind of art, a different kind of music.”In “Golden Galactic,” the album’s first single, Pantha du Prince delineates a golden shimmer that’s like a primordial substance for life –the desire to live: “I recorded ‘Golden Galactic’ during a really special moment. I was awake and this golden shimmer slipped through my fingersand turned into sound. I keptplayingand playingon a synthesizer while listeningto myself play. Then I listened to this music with Friedrich Paravicini. Afterwards, he composed stringsfor it –it’s like a musical dialogue.”Many of the new tracks are based on such “captured moments,” on first takes like the “golden shimmer” that drew Pantha du Prince into his own music. For example, the track “Blume,” which is German for “flower,” received its final polish through a conscious act of letting go. Pantha du Prince sent what wasfor him a finished track to Bendik Hovik Kjeldsbergin Oslo, who then intervenedand rearranged everything. And it was Kieldsberg’s idea to have Helena Tusvik Rosenlundsing an additional track over Hendrik Weber’s reverberated vocals.Pantha du Prince: “In English you can also hear the German word ‘Blume’ as ‘bloom,’ that is, as a process of growing, blossoming, and the cyclical nature of developing oneself. When a flower blossoms, its withering is an inherent part of the process. And that’s why the nine new tracks also have a senseof melancholytothem–they have an awareness that beauty is fleeting. ‘Blume’ is abouta dream landscape, a parallel reality, a possible space into which we can diveinto: we dream but then later forget what wedreamt. What remains is perhaps a glimmer of hope, the knowledge that something was there.”This explains why the pervasive melancholy inPantha du Prince’s musicalways hassomething hopefulto it. On tracks like “Blume,” he allows for extremely fragile musical moods to simplyexist and bolsters them with frequencies that seem to naturally communicate with us. This is also true of “Heaven is Where You Are” –according to Pantha du Prince, fulfillment, peace, happiness, and paradise can always be found wherever you happen to be. All the utopian qualities of dreams existinside the individual.None of the tracks on Garden Gaiawererecorded with the exact same lineup. He collaborated with different musicians in different places on every track.That Garden Gaiais such an incredibly homogenous album despite the diversity has to do with the fact that Pantha du Prince has,to some extent,seen himself as an observer of what was created with others before his very own eyes. He just leta lot of things happen –as if he were watching a garden grow. If we follow this idea evenfurther, then this garden is noneother than the Garden of Eden, and the planet Earth is a manifestation of paradise.Pantha du Prince: “In retrospect, there was something quite natural about the way the record was made. I’ve been continuously working on tracks since the release of Conference of Trees, and the concrete finetuning started in December 2021 –I was finishedby the end of January. Everyone had some timeon their hands. Whenever I sent out a track, I received a musical response within a

few days, sometimes even on the same day. Homogeneity through diversity. On the Norther Hemisphere,thisseems to work best in January when people have time –and when they long for spring and its natural, cyclical growth duringthe cold winter.”Garden Gaiais the latest chapter in a project that has been ten years in the making, which presents the artist, Hendrik Weber aka Pantha du Prince, as a close observer and mindful listener. It adds a new, forward-looking perspective to Pantha duPrince’s work, which began in 2004 with Diamond Daze, released on Dial Records.