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March 6, 2020 - Modern Recordings
There is a place called the Cathedral Grove out on the west coast of North America. I have never been, but, as someone with an intellectual interest in art and the sublime, I read about it often and imagine from afar. The heavy height and silence of the douglas fir and red cedar trees dampens the presence of the humans who visit it, and the limbs arch high overhead in that shape that inspired the pointed arches of gothic architecture. That grove is one of the most ancient, sacred places of what was once The New World.
Here I sit weary in that world, new no longer, on the east coast of the United States listening to German producer Pantha du Prince’s new album Conference of Trees. Sirens outside the window occasionally interrupt my escape to the space this album has created just for me, as someone static far away from Cathedral Grove and the experience of old life forms. And I remember how much trees matter in my relationship to the combination of sounds in Pantha du Prince’s music, the language of it, as well as the instruments that make the individual sounds themselves. Some of the instruments he employs to sing of trees are, in fact, made of trees. Humanity is completely indebted to the forests that occupy this planet, even as our focus on technology grows beyond (pun intended) the wood toward synthetics and sheen and the extraterrestrial. Hendrik Weber is asking us to stay grounded and consider how much we still don’t know.
At this point, I know I’ve moved past the event horizon of a heated romantic tangent about the natural world and our place in it. But the album’s title coupled with the soft meditative sound baths within it elicit great thoughts like giant ancient conifers. Trees in old-growth forests know each other. They communicate with each other. They communicate with animals and insects in the environment. We still don’t know what they are saying and are just beginning to learn. Until recently in Western history, the forest was a symbol of the unknown. A place to respect and be afraid of. But now we’ve contained the forest by drawing lines around it and defining what is nature and what is not. The new research into tree communication in the old growth forests has captured the imaginations of the empathetic public and the enterprising writers—and the artists.
I listened to Pantha du Prince in college, but I’ll admit that I didn’t follow him very closely after that. I used to listen to his music while studying. In fact, I learned of him on the Sparknotes website, on a blog post listing great music for studying. I was attracted to this music because, even though it was more on the ambient side, there is real momentum to it and attention to detail. Weber is a musician who is passionate about learning all the sounds this world can make for the human register and exploring what instruments we’ve invented throughout remembered history to make sounds we like. Weber’s music is playful and expressive. It’s ambient enough to read literature by but engaging enough to get lost inside of.
Of course Weber would be the artist to make an album about how trees communicate. This may not be an intentional connection, but the symbol of the forest has great significance in Germany’s folklore, history and art. The German forest was long a signifier of unified cultural identity. Even without knowing the concept of this album, a thoughtful listener could guess that this work is rooted in (pun intended) the forest, even if it’s not that symbolic forest of German memory. Weber uses instruments that invite wildness into our collective imagination. These are the sounds of the woods and the jungles of adventure movies, mysterious, organic and a little bit dark. Conference of Trees starts out soft and easy. The first track ‘Approach in a Breeze’ is a more lyrical crescendo of overlapping chords without a defined beat being laid down. But the momentum quickly picks up after that with the elevated jungle percussion play of the second track, ‘Transparent Tickle Shining Glace.’ That beat is up in the canopy in an energetic rise followed by a brief interlude in ‘Holding the Oak.’ But when the first beat on the ground is gently but decisively placed in the fourth track ‘When We Talk,’ the album begins its bloom into an optimistic cadence that is marchable and, indeed, danceable. The mood climaxes with the reverence of the cello in ‘Silentium Larix’ and the tik-tok wood block of ‘Pius in Tacet.’ By the end, listeners are primed perfectly for the album's resolution, the ethereal human chorus of ‘Lichtung’ that cracks us open into a thousand dissolving pieces.
Conference of Trees is a collection of songs that express vibrancy and diversity in a synth-laden wash of sound. What I like most about the album is the fact that the concept is cohesive, but there is a wide variety to the tracks from start to finish. Also that it’s full of beautiful sounds that make my brain tingle. It’s much less ambient, much more narrative and demanding than the Pantha du Prince of my college nights. More pressing on my attention. An epic hike through the forest that is tragically far away from me in my concrete towers. A reminder of its life-giving hold on our memory, our development, our language and our identity as a terrestrial species. We are trees, not stars. ☔