Pantha du Prince has announced the release of his new album Garden Gaia.
Garden Gaia is 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 du Prince’s work, which began in 2004 with Diamond Daze, his first album, and found his way with the critically acclaimed masterpiece Black Noise and his first collaborative album The Bell Laboratory.
The new album, Garden Gaia will be released August 26, 2022, on CD / LP / Digital and features the first single “Golden Galactic” out now, with a video by Natalia Stuyk, a video and installation artist based in Granada, Spain.
Like Conference of Trees (his first album on Modern Recordings, 2020), Garden Gaiaisan artistic exploration of nature. An investigation with the means of music about the earth as a vision of a perfectly functioning garden. Reflection on nature has been the overarching theme of Pantha du Prince’s music and an integral part of his musical research.
To the same extent, nature is not only a place of longing for more and more people who see it as an alternative to the weariness of meaningless eternal commercial progress, the concern for the earth as a place of the future is also the central social and cultural discourse in society.
“There are scientists who say that we humans are the 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,” says Pantha du Prince. “I’ve poured all of these experiences into Garden Gaia as music. And that’s to be taken in the literal sense of ‘pouring,’ since we belong to a flowing process on this planet. A tree also flows into the air, just as it’s connected to other trees beneath the ground through currents of communication. Our lungs flow into our bodies. And as embryos, we were flowing beings. The question is: to what extent can we adult humans continue to flow?”
That said, Pantha du Prince doesn’t make music as a provocation. His tracks are founded upon the principle of empathy and the willingness to change the system within us. It’s not about limitless growth or accumulation or overexploiting resources (including our own) but about a productive emergence as an individual in the current of the world.
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 fingers and turned into sound. I kept playing and playing on a synthesizer while listening to myself play. Then I listened to this music with Friedrich Paravicini. Afterward, he composed strings for it – it’s like a musical dialogue.”
For the nine new tracks on Garden Gaia, Pantha du Prince has again expanded his musical vocabulary of electroacoustic expression in a creative process that is extremely collaborative. None of the tracks on Garden Gaia were recorded with the exact same lineup: He collaborated with different musicians in different locations on every track. That Garden Gaia is such an incredibly homogenous album despite the diversity has to do with the fact that Pantha du Prince has, to some extent, seeing himself as an observer of what was created with others before his very own eyes. He just let a lot of things happen – as if he were watching a garden grow. If we follow this idea even further, then this garden is none other than the Garden of Eden, and the planet Earth is a manifestation of paradise.
Listen to “Golden Galactic” HERE
Watch the video HERE
