Pantha Du Prince Makes Techno for the Timid

Pantha du Prince, aka minimal techno producer Hendrik Weber, has always been an outsider.

He grew up in Germany straddling many scenes, from shoegaze shows to afterhours clubs, which fueled his 2010 critically-acclaimed landscape-techno album, 'Black Noise.' Collaboration with revered experimenters Animal Collective (also appearing on the just-released remix album, 'XI versions of Black Noise') landed him on top indie blogs.

With the music snob elite cooing over him, one wonders how that affects the dancefloor at his live shows. After all, indie kids don't dance, do they?

"They do. They do that," Weber tells Spinner. "After a while you have a shaking, swinging crowd in front of you."

But, he concedes, a static crowd is no sweat off his brow.

"Even if they are only standing there, it's good for me, I can still improvise ... In a Europe club situation -- everyone's drunk and just want energy to move -- you will probably not experiment as much." Weber understands the pressure to rock the big beats to get a crowd dancing, but he aligns more with that guy at the back of the club.

"I'm a dancer, but I'm a dancer when I feel like it, not when I'm forced to," he says. "I want to attract the people who just stand in the corner... this is how I was for a long time as well -- just being shy or afraid of letting yourself go. There's moments of that in my music, you know, a certain shyness or introspection. That should be there, otherwise I didn't do a good job."

Watch the Video for Pantha du Prince's 'Stick to My Side'
Pantha du Prince isn't shy to experiment -- growing up, his parents would take him to avant-garde jazz and classical concerts -- and it's no surprise his chime-infused, highly conceptual techno is attracting a wide range of personalities.

"I had a lot of friends who couldn't [mix genres]. They were either part of the techno scene or the indie scene or the punk scene, because they needed this kind of identification and social structure around that. I was not like that -- I was an outsider in all the scenes. But in my head it was all combined into one ideal place, that all these scenes should get along with each other.

"And now it's happening as the concept of Pantha du Prince."