[Cover photo credit to Frederic Boudin]
Pantha du Prince will be releasing new album Garden Gaia on August 26th, 2022 via CD/LP/Digital formats. The album forms the next chapter in a ten year project where artist Hendrik Weber makes close observations about the natural world. The first single “Golden Galactic” out now, with a video by Natalia Stuyk, who is a video and installation artist based in Granada, Spain.
Like Conference of Trees, his first album on Modern Recordings in 2020, Garden Gaia is “an artistic exploration of nature”. It envisions the earth as “a perfectly functioning garden”. It not only presents nature as an escape from human commercial progress but as something for the future which we must be concerned about.
Weber comments:
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 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?
In “Golden Galactic,” Weber tracks the experience of a “golden shimmer” he experienced as sound:
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. Afterwards, he composed strings for it – it’s like a musical dialogue.
