On the surface Hendrik Weber embodies the Teutonic techno producer archetype: pale, wiry, with sculpted cheekbones and artfully dishevelled hair.

Weber is an earnest and thoughtful conversationalist, serious-minded, cerebral even. Delve a little deeper however, and he becomes somewhat harder to pigeonhole.

Weber started recording as Pantha Du Prince for Hamburg’s Dial label in 2002, producing a succession of fairly straightforward minimal records until he released the widely acclaimed This Bliss in 2007. An album of elegant, emotive techno, This Bliss was not so much minimal as economical, and found favour with many listeners who had enjoyed records like James Holden’s The Idiots Are Winning ’and Nathan Fake’s Drowning in a Sea of Love.

Weber’s 2006 remix of Depeche Mode’s ‘Lilian’ earned Pantha Du Prince a cache in more typically rock circles which has led to him remixing tracks by Animal Collective and The Long Blondes. While This Bliss may have won the respect of poker faced techno fans and cardigan wearing indie types alike, much has changed in electronic music since 2007.

In recent years the influence of garage, dubstep, rave and hardcore has been audible across the spectrum of electronica. The saturated, hypercoloured compositions of artists like Zomby, HudMo and Joker suggest a kind of attention deficit amongst young producers, a reaction perhaps to the pervasive influence of minimal techno over club music during the first half of the last decade.

While techno is hardly a spent force, its period of indisputable dominance seems, for the time being, to have ended, forcing imaginative producers to find new contexts in which to deploy the 4/4 kick. While Shackleton and Sandwell District have been exploring techno’s seemingly limitless potential for labyrinthine rhythmic complexity and abyss-like darkness, Robert Henke has been embracing the experiential qualities of ambient music, thrillingly realised on Monolake’s magnificent Silence.

Pantha Du Prince’s latest album, released on Rough Trade and entitled Black Noise, concerns itself with the idea that music exists everywhere, in what Charles Ubaghs, in his review for The Quietus, refers to as “a kind of perpetual a priori state”; in wind, trees and rock; in the latent, inaudible frequencies that comprise silence. In Weber’s opinion, and according to Rough Trade’s press release, the role of the musician is to “render audible what is unheard”.

I recently caught up with Weber to discuss inspirations, his artistic development and the creative processes involved in the creation of Black Noise.

I read that you grew up in Hanover. I wondered if you could talk about how that might have affected your music-making as opposed to growing up somewhere with a more widely recognised music scene.

“Actually, Kassel was where I was growing up. Kassel is an area where there is a lot of woods and mountains.”

So have you always felt drawn to that, rather than to the more urban environments of, say, Berlin?

“Yeah, I grew up in the countryside, but it was close to the city so I always went to indie parties or rock clubs where you could listen to Depeche Mode and British guitar music. I also went to the Wave Club, which was more new wave, shoegaze, stuff like this. There was a techno club called Stammheim, where DJs from Frankfurt and Berlin would come and play.”

I read that you were really into some of the British shoegaze bands.

“Yes. The noise pop in the end of the 80s or beginning of the 90s was for me like a teenage initiation, so to say. The time when you’re rebellious but you’re not into rebellion or something, so you try to form your own personality and the first thing that makes you do that is music somehow. I was really into this new kind of human music, this new type of musician or whatever you could call it, people like My Bloody Valentine, and they were influential in how they did what they did.

“What is behind the halting (position/attitude), how you do it, the gestures you use. You look to the ground, but you’re still doing these super powerful sounds and you’re blowing people away with your noise walls and still it’s sweet and has a certain melancholy but at the same time it’s super brutal. That’s what really caught my attention and was hitting me during a certain time. At the same time I was going to techno clubs and was listening to techno music and to the opera and shit like this because, you know, sometimes your parents take you out! These are the contradictions that I was learning to deal with.”

It was interesting the way you described the shoegaze bands there, it’s perhaps not unlike how I might describe some of your music: the sweetness, melancholy, but also something of the brutality of techno is there. You’ve talked about how you’re trying to do something quite different from what other techno producers are trying to do. I wondered if you could talk a bit about how you view those differences.

“For me, a lot of the techno music that is produced for the club is made for a certain effectiveness: a certain infectious body relation that is trying to be more and more groovy, have more and more swing, and the technical devices really develop fast. It’s kind of overwhelming sometimes how groovy a track can get and is only filled up with information that is necessary to make your body move but not your mind explore. For me that is basically a difference: compared to a lot of producers I try to give some other information, to try to tell a story of levels and plateaus in the music that are normally not so well represented. I try to change the hierarchy of the sound that dance music needs to be working.”

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