- The traces of a year spent far away, those that linger and haunt once you've crash-landed back to reality, are sometimes the soul's most precious cargo. To hold those fleeting memories close, some people take to journal writing, others revisit their photo collection. Gold Panda's gone and made his debut EP instead. Full of subdued, contemplative emotion, the tunes and their titles invoke exotic locales and states of mind in transit, reflecting the year that this UK native spent living in Japan. The fractured futurism and downtempo glitch offered here, reminiscent of Flying Lotus or Four Tet, has enough of a solo-laptopper vibe that you can easily picture Mr. Panda holed up with his Apple on the transatlantic flight back to Chelmsford, translating travel impressions into beats.
"Back Home" resembles The Field in its fuzzed-out hypnotic sampledelia, taking its time in unfolding the melodic contours of a sample so that it grows in complexity, like a flower opening in spring. Vinyl crackle and the pitch stretching effect on a tape recorder add a nicely tactile dimension. Of the tunes here, "Back Home" has the most distinctly Japanese scent to it, it's airy, origami-like, ephemeral, with flashes of exotic instruments emerging in the flux, like something shiny glimpsed in the tide. The glitched-up melody doesn't immediately take hold in your ears but rather endears itself upon repeated listens.
"Long Vacation" is a glitch-hoppy head-nodder, opening with a spoken sample, "sometimes you make plans, sometimes they don't work out," that evokes the unpredictable openness of travel, then falling into reverie, wanderlust, a passing daydream while staring out the window of some train hurtling in high-tech silence across a foreign landscape; its wistful synth chords cavort with video-game bing-bongs and blasts of white digital noise. "Mayuri" adopts a more Detroit-style techno groove that stands in marked contrast with its peaceable predecessors, but feels like it might be leading itself astray, as if the track wants to offer up a catharsis that it ends up smothering instead, giving hints of emotive gospely chords only to bury them in lo-res distortion and glitch-ed up beats. But that's travel for you—bouts of toil and confusion interspersed with bursts of sudden joy.
Tracklist A Back Home
B1 Mayuri
B2 Long Vacation