Pantha du Prince Review

I think my expectation when waiting for Pantha du Prince the rising German techno artist – to grace us with his new album Black Noise live at Cargo last weekend was for a fairly solitary experience into the dark nether reaches of distorted Electronica. Its fair to say that from the moment he rose to the stage hooded and cloaked in black, he enticed us and sent us down a twisted pantha like hole to some bleak, cold and faraway land. I suppose this was also aided by the screening of imagess behind him that hed taken of snow-capped mountains and frozen lakes.

The soundscape generated by his gimmickry and live-production skills teased and manipulated the tracks from the album. The quieter moments such as The Splendour and Abglanz kept their subtlety by the haunting quality of the surreal bleeps, chimes and dubbed out tones. What for the first half hour started out as a wanky muso-type head nod was blown apart when PDP began to bang out the heady synthesised bass lines and persistent rhythms of the tracks Bohemian Forest and Behind the Stars. It was at this point I felt Id been bewitched, hypnotised even and couldnt stop my feet from moving. I can honestly say that I was overwhelmed by how good the set was. He even managed to make what is essentially a laptop set look interesting no mean feat.

The only complaint about the night was the poor sound system, which made the more bass-heavy parts of the tracks sound more like white noise as opposed to black. This seemed most obvious at the cacophonic noisy conclusion of Stick to My Side, the penultimate track of the night. To ease us out of the pantha hole and back into reality PDP completed the set with the tranquil Im Bann oh and Cargo turning on the lights at 11 pm to get rid of us before the next club started probably helped that transition.

Katie Gibbons