Review: Pantha du Prince and the Bell Laboratory

Pantha du Prince and the Bell Laboratory
NCH, Dublin
****

Fusing electronica with bell-ringing might seem faintly ridiculous on paper. However, this live collaboration between Pantha du Prince (German producer and musician Hendrik Weber) and the Norwegian percussion group Bell Laboratory turns out to be the most tuneful fun possibly ever heard in the august surrounds of the National Concert Hall.

The live show, based around last year’s collaborative album Elements of Light, may be brief (including an encore, it lasts about 70 minutes), but there is more going on sonically than in most shows twice that length. And it’s all a bit odd, what with a three-ton carillon (a glass-enclosed box housing a set of bronze bells) on stage, as well as six people that look remarkably like uniformed waiters in a Belgian restaurant.

Taken as a single piece of music (although there are dynamic shifts in volume and pace that are naturally construed as "breaks"), Elements of Light patiently unfolds in exploratory fashion, bringing to mind John Cage, Steve Reich, Test Department and Björk (notably the "music box" tinkles and trinkets of her Verspertine album). What truly surprises, though, is how Weber's trademark shimmers of glacial and insistent electronica are integrated with the percussion – nothing seems forced or shoehorned into position, while the regular, vibrant waves of melody on various hand-chime instruments are as soothing as a contemplative spa treatment.

There’s humour, too – when the six musicians seemingly glide off stage and eerily walk along the venue aisles, chimes in hand, it looks like it could be a scene from George A Romero’s long-lost zombie movie The Night of the Living Campanologists. And then there is the dancing, which isn’t something one automatically associates with the NCH. But there we are, as one, during the encore, making strange and awkward shapes in front of men wearing white aprons, who in turn are creating music with a strong spiritual dimension.

Have we heard or seen anything as beguiling or nuanced like this before? Absolutely not. In a word – how about bellissimo?