(Downtempo, Deep House, Nu-Disco) [WEB] Prins Thomas - Prins Thomas III - 2014, FLAC (tracks), lossless

One of Thomas Moen Hermansen’s greatest strengths seems to be a well-managed lack of discipline. This isn’t to imply that he’s some kind of slacker; Prins Thomas III is the third solo LP he’s put out since 2010, on top of the knee-high stack of singles, remixes, and DJ mixes that he’s released over the past decade. (Not to mention the couple of well-regarded albums he’s recorded with Hans-Peter Lindstrøm). But the texture of his music suggests that he’s not working according to any overarching plan or formula, simply letting his creations wander where they please, without enforcing any rules to ruin the fun. Unlike the majority of artists who embrace this kind of lenient creative philosophy, his work doesn’t turn out terminally self-indulgent or a blob of undifferentiated sonic mush.
Hermansen—better known as Prins Thomas—is a prime mover in “space disco,” an amalgamation of disco, electro, krautrock, and pop that feels as casually assembled as one of his albums. Space disco is about as much goofy fun as the name suggests, and its existence is a low-key but intensely effective rebuttal to the self-seriousness that dance music has a habit of falling victim to on a predictably regular basis.
In his liner notes Hermansen insists that there’s “no space disco” on III, and that the album similarly has “no great concept, no specific theme, no scheme, no plan.” Pedantic space disco fans, if there are such a thing, can debate whether the music technically qualifies or not. But the style’s essential playfulness is still here, as well as the right amount of unabashedly screwy synth tones and cowbells, even if it’s overall an even more relaxed experience than most of Hermansen’s past work.
III isn’t an emphatically dancey record; it’s more like space disco’s chill-out room equivalent. Disco’s presence in the mix has been muted, or at least reined in, and in many places it’s overshadowed by ambient music, which has always hovered in the periphery of Hermansen’s influences, and which he indulges in here to an unprecedented extent. His most thorough embrace of the style comes on “Luftspeiling", a drumless 13-minute-long synthesizer excursion that’s much more entertaining than that description suggests. It begins with a chunky major-key synth arpeggio that he layers with spacey pads and burbling, slightly acid-y leads, as well as a sprawlingly delayed looping guitar figure, returning to an unadorned arpeggio every time things cross a very low threshold of excitement. The results bring to mind Kraftwerk, but some extremely mellowed-out alternate-universe version of the group that got really into benzos and balearic music. (Even the song’s title, the Norwegian word for heat mirages, literally “air mirroring,” evokes a more blissfully psychedelic image of the Autobahn.)
But Hermansen’s split from the microgenre he’s most closely linked to isn’t as absolute as his notes suggest. The album opens with “Hans Majestet", which boasts a burbling synth bass, a chugging drumbeat, and a sweeping melody that makes it sound like the theme song from a straight to video action movie from the VHS era. It closes 10 songs later with “Åpne Slusa”, which piles together manic high-pitched strings, clanging cowbell, bouncing sub-bass, and a house beat that could have come from the style’s earliest days. In between there’s a lot of stuff that’s just as danceable, only in a more abstract way. Hermansen hasn’t given up on the party; he’s just moved it someplace further out.