Pantha Du Prince, Troxy, London

The Convergence Festival returned this year with yet another mind-boggling roster of electronic talent, live gigs and talks around music and technology, and for the closing night Convergence hosts a night of electronic genius in a converted cinema in London’s East End. As well as seminal Skull Disco founder Shackleton and electronic Warp-trio, Darkstar, the night features a performance from everybody’s favourite German tech-cum-house-cum-ambient-cum-classical producer, Hendrik Weber - Pantha Du Prince.

Weber has made a career out of bridging the gap between electronic and classical music, producer turned composer back to producer, and just like Reich, Glass and all, Weber sits in the middle of that dance/classical Venn diagram, deftly displaying the simple fact that as dance music is not just thrown together by anyone with a mac, so classical composition shouldn’t be seen as a genre, but rather a mode of making music.

Weber’s set mostly comprises songs from 2010’s Black Noise, his first album on Rough Trade and to all intents, the ‘crossover’ album for Pantha Du Prince (featuring collaborations with longtime remix buddy, Noah Lennox). Black Noise was born out of of field recordings from Weber’s sojourns in the Swiss Alps, and one could be forgiven for thinking the material might sound out of place in a dark venue at 2am. However it quickly becomes clear that any fears are unfounded - quite apart from the fact that Black Noise is Weber’s most dance-orientated release (strange and beautiful as 2014’s Bell Laboratory experiment was, carillons and marimbas aren’t really built to get you fistpumping and standing on chairs), tracks from Black Noise open up sonic soundscapes that reach far beyond the sticky floors of the venue. Wreathed in shadow, Weber adjusts the music live, pirouetting around his audience - beat-focused minimalism seguing gently into the sonic abstraction of his more ambient work.

And it is this sonic abstraction that really forms the backbone of PDP - the slow-build of the bounce on the clubbier material is increased tenfold, as Weber moves seamlessly into the kind of late night frost of the more shall we say ‘chime-orientated’ work. From the tapping of a woodblock to footsteps in the snow, from the glockenspiel to glistening bells, as Hendrik Weber stands up on a stage, bathed in the glow and mixing up noises right there in front of you, it’s easy to close your eyes and forget quite where you are.