The story of Gold Panda s journey from an acclaimed debut record to now, as he prepares to release his third full length album, is an entirely circular one. Hailing from Chelmsford Essex in the UK, in the six years since the release of his genre-defining debut album "Lucky Shiner", the electronic artist most comfortable with the moniker Derwin Panda spent the subsequent years splitting the majority of his time between London, Berlin and countless excursions to Japan. As he created his third album "Good Luck And Do Your Best" he ultimately found himself back where he began, in the East of England.
Origin stories can be fundamentally boring by nature, packed with non-essential details and overly stressed homilies to roots and influences. But the core nature of an artist that has produced some of the most beloved and emotionally-infused electronic music of this decade is deeply rooted in the constant desire to return to where his musical world began.
Gold Panda s first album Lucky Shiner was written in a matter of weeks in the Essex countryside and titled after his impossibly-brilliantly named Grandmother, who is Indian by birth but a resident of Chelmsford since the late 1960s. Along the way she even ended up gracing the cover of a music magazine with Gold Panda in 2010.
His second album Half Of Where You Live was written while living in Berlin for a couple of short years, but became to be a record that was about everywhere except that place he never identify as home. Gold Panda s third, and, for the sake of adhering to both truth and biographical tradition, his best album so far, squared the circle. Inspired into being while visiting Japan, the music was once again composed and recorded back in Chelmsford. This time, he was living with his Grandmother, Lucky Shiner, having created a small studio area in their house. Derwin set about spending 18 months piecing together Good Luck And Do Your Best from the hundred or so tracks that he would begin composing and then either discard, keep or repurpose.
As a musician that has enjoyed both the acclaim and also the cognitive confusion of touring the world and selling out shows in LA, New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, London and many places in between, The past few years have seen Gold Panda concluding that the core of his life and resulting comforts are rooted at home. Driven by destinct desire for normalcy and structure, its something that he feels he achieved while making this record. “I mean, probably most 35 year old people dont live with their Grandmother”, he laughs, “but I could lead a somewhat normal daily routine. Which I really missed.”
Stepping back two years though, the inspiration for the record and its creation are two distinctly different things. “Good Luck And Do Your Best was initially planned to be something else entirely. Early in 2014 Derwin set out back to Japan for the first of a pair of trips – the latest of many visits to the place he holds most dear. This time a photographer, Laura Lewis, accompanied him as Derwin s plan was to collect both audio – field recordings from his trip across the country – and visuals, with Laura tasked to capture what they saw and encountered together. The idea was to be able to put together something other than a traditional record; a sight and sound documentary of his time there, but the expedition ended up being the basis of a new record.
小白兔官網
