Gold Panda at The White Hotel
Johnny James, Managing EditorBook now
Gold Panda
Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.
Most dance producers start with the bangers and work their way towards something more ambient. Gold Panda is doing it the other way around.
Essex-born producer Gold Panda first caught attention back in 2010 with his debut album Lucky Shiner – a soothing, Eastern-inflected journey into the life of its creator, packed with quickfire samples and IDM rhythms that looked towards ’90s Warp Records. He broke through further with the gorgeous Half of Where You Live, a staple of every self-respecting Uni afterparty in 2013. Inspired by world travel, this record saw Derwin Dicker AKA Gold Panda continue pinching samples from different countries and cultures and weaving them together into an emotive tapestry of personal history.
His last album, 2022’s The Work, turned further inwards. Six years in the making, it drew on therapy, running and quitting drinking. It was glistening, reflective electronica that still fell short of being out-and-out dancefloor music. “I find making club music hard,” Dicker said at the time. “I don’t spend enough time in them. I don’t know where I fit in, and maybe that’s good.”
That makes TON UP all the more of a surprise. Released this summer on Studio Barnhus, it’s a run of rough-hewn house tracks pegged at around 140bpm. Old-school hip-hop drums are pushed through pumping house machinery, the mix runs dangerously hot, and most tracks open with the sound of revving engines. By Dicker’s own account, there’s zero of the “dreaded, over-explained ‘maturity’” usually expected of electronic artists several albums deep.
It hasn’t come from nowhere. Over the past few years he’s been slipping out late-night house cuts as DJ Jenifa and Grid Man, and teaming up with Fort Romeau. This is the first time he’s committed a whole Gold Panda album to it, though, and the result is fast, scrappy and fun. It doesn’t sound like someone unsure where he fits. It sounds like someone who has stopped worrying about it.
Gold Panda’s live shows have always taken his tunes somewhere dancier and heavier. For once, he might not have to change things up all that much. And an album full of revving engines couldn’t find a more suitable home than a converted mechanics’ garage, could it?
