New music from Gold Panda alert. It's called '222', which is fun because the song is also two-minutes-two-seconds long. It's a song of two halves, or thereabouts. We begin our journey into the minutiae-filled world of Gold Panda (aka the human Derwin Schlecker) with a whirl of dynamically wobbly, out-of-tune chords and masterfully cut glossy vocal samples sitting between them like half-said sentences.
At around the 1:11 mark it becomes a rapid fire stream of what may be guessed to be koto strings, the detail and design of it all underpinned by a minimalist garage shuffle, and occasional bass boops driving a groove like a gossamer stake into a patch of tofu-soft ground.
But that's not all. Alongside this single we get '0.2', like a coda to the strings that came before, except this time stuttering and decorated with a pitched-down melody, gradually swimming in hefty reverb and a touch of distortion. Buy the end, the sttuttering glitches have become the tickings of a machine, the hands of a clock; angst meets ambient. Together these two tracks present a well-studied soundtrack to everyday living, the movement and the stillness alike.
- 🔔 This slice of new music from Gold Panda is available to own physically on a 6" transparent PVC lathe-cut disc, but you must buy it to possess it. Bandcamp is the place to go for all your purchasing options, which also includes a digital download.
- 🔔 The art though. That shade of purple, more a lilac or lavender, really hits. The photo (taken by GP himself) of the abandoned kei van next to those half-toppled plastic crates gives you a good idea of the imagery that you should hold in your mind's eye when listening to these pieces of music.
- 🔔 You may also be interested to note that Gold Panda's 2010 debut Lucky Shiner was re-released on 9th August as part of Ghostly's 25th Anniversary celebrations. It is possible to purchase a deluxe edition of Lucky Shiner over here via Ghostly.
