Ahead of his Australian appearance in January at Sydney Festival 2011, Cyclic Defrost spoke with Gold Panda.
Melonie Bayl-Smith: Reading over your website bio and news, you’ve been travelling around a fair bit recently. How has the tour been going?
Gold Panda: Yeah, it’s been great – and it’s been long as well!
I looked at the dates and thought “Gee, it’s been a couple of months of some really hard work for you.”
Gold Panda: Yeah, it’s been really tough – especially for someone who wasn’t planning on playing live (laughs)
Melonie Bayl-Smith: I found it interesting that you started the tour in Japan. It’s well known that you have a keen interest in Japanese culture to the point of undertaking studies in this area. It would be great to gain some insight as to how you’ve found touring there, gaining an appreciation not as a tourist but actually playing and performing there.
Gold Panda: It’s been great to be able to go there and do this as a job, in that I’ve been trying to find a reason to be in Japan other than teach English or something else, which I really didn’t want to do. In terms of my original inspiration, I saw Akira, an anime film, when I was 14 and then found out that computer games were made there [Japan] and got more and more into Japanese culture, really. I ended up going on a holiday there when I was 19, I spent two weeks in Tokyo with a friend and just had a great time.
Melonie Bayl-Smith: How have you found your appreciation of Japanese culture informing your music now? When you were performing live, did you feel that you could draw something from ‘the place’ more so than if you were elsewhere?
Gold Panda: I like the repetition of how Japan looks, the buildings, you see them and they’re all so similar… and then you’ll see something different and it seems quite out of place! In music, where the beats repeat and then you have one sound that appears every now and then, or perhaps it never happens again – this is quite interesting to me.
Melonie Bayl-Smith: Picking up on that last comment, in listening to Lucky Shiner, some tracks reflect essences of classic minimalism – phasing, repeated phrases, elements changing ever so slightly, and so on. Is it purely electronic music or the broader spectrum of minimalism that you draw from most?
Gold Panda: I like music where, well, where nothing happens! (laughs) I certainly like those ideas [of classic minimalism]. I like the way specific things look and repeat, and it doesn’t have to be very interesting at all, it doesn’t have to be an artwork or anything like that. It can just be things from daily life. What it all looks like, I’m trying to create a mental picture of that in my music. Whether it’s just a wall, or something else banal. I guess I’m not that well read on minimalism, but definitely minimalistic German electronic music interests me. In terms of Lucky Shiner, I wanted the album to be focused, in that there didn’t need to be so much change in each track, you know, verse, chorus, vocals etc.
Melonie Bayl-Smith: I noticed that your use of vocals is limited to cutting up samples, layering them, distorting them – techniques again with their origins in Minimalism, and obviously adopted and translated over and over across the realms of electronic music. It’s clearly a very deliberate pursuit in there being no vocal line – even in a melismatic way – purely using the voice as a sample or texture.
Gold Panda: Yeah definitely, like it’s just another instrument, not something with other elements under it [in the mix]. I really just wanted a soundtrack to how I felt about things – I thought that vocals were too “pushy” and that they tie the music down. With a vocal I guess you could attach a meaning, say of melancholy, when I think the songs are quite happy, and yes, that might be your way of interpreting the music… I guess when the songs have vocals I thought it too much allowed people to say “Oh, that one’s about love…”
Melonie Bayl-Smith: …whereas if you remove the vocal line it opens up the music to various interpretations at different times, like a soundtrack of real time emotions.
Gold Panda: Yeah, and take the track “You,” it doesn’t actually use the word “you” other people think it does, I thought it sounded like that when I first made it…
Melonie Bayl-Smith: (laughs)
Gold Panda:…but it doesn’t!!!
Melonie Bayl-Smith: Moving to another track on the album, “Parents” is a lovely acoustic counterpoint to many of the other songs, what’s your view on the intersection of acoustic and electronic music?
Gold Panda: Yeah, I like the feel of some recordings where you hear the outside, or pick up sounds you weren’t expecting. A lot of those sounds fit into electronic music quite well, whereas many people think sounds fit better if they come from a drum machine or a sample. Or, conversely something electronic can be made to sound like an everyday sound, like a sound in the house.
Melonie Bayl-Smith: Perhaps then, what comes out of your music is a search for the space around acoustic sounds (an obsession of some other electronic artists) not via electronic means per se, but rather arranging the samples ‘around’ each other, creating ‘space’ in the music via this method?
Because I’m sampling from vinyl quite a lot, especially for this album, you find a lot of the time that the good sounds are where the record ends – the drone out – or you hear a note played and then there’s a space, so I take the end of the note AND that space. And then I play it louder, or take it up and down to make a melody out of it. That’s definitely an area of interest which I’ll probably explore more in the future.
Melonie Bayl-Smith: Yes, on those hundred plus tracks you’ve apparently got kicking around…
Gold Panda: (laughs) Oh, that’s been overexaggerated over the course of this year! It started at 40 tracks, then went to 100 – the other day it was up to 200! It’s funny: sure I do have a lot of tracks hanging about but some of them are just a 5 minute loop that I like but hasn’t gone any further, and it needs work done to it.
Melonie Bayl-Smith: You spent a lot of time archiving your own music I’m curious as to the reasons for doing that. Was it purely to easily identify where you sources for the album came from, or more about working through your own thinking on music?
Gold Panda: I guess I actually did that in trying to find more what I really enjoy in music, because at the end of the day I’m doing it [music]as a hobby, it’s fun to pull songs apart and put them back together. For example, at the start, I was inspired by Puff Daddy putting this big Sting sample in a track, but then later on I realised that a sample didn’t have to be THAT obvious. And then as I got more into the technology I realised I could take a small sample and turn it into a big sample, and so on.
Melonie Bayl-Smith: Moving to some other things you’ve been doing, you’ve been remixing other artists’ tracks. How have you found that process, curating sounds from other artists versus the process of being self-critical in your own recordings?
Gold Panda: When you’ve doing a remix, you’ve already got some foundations of how the tracks sound to start with, there’s already a track laid and you’re given these parts to play with. Some of the time I think I just want to make the remix track into a four-minute pop song, whereas other times I want to turn the track into an 11 minute minimalist techno workout! The remixes I’m inspired to do come out quite well, and the ones that I’m doing “for money”, well it’s more “What do the record label want?”
Melonie Bayl-Smith: As if there’s already an implied framework that you have to address, a brief of sorts…
Yeah, if they’re real bores and I can make ten minute electronic versions of the track instead of trying to keep the vocals I’ll do it… sometimes though it’s just nice to work with a track and keep it “pop” and acceptable, rather than going off in a “Gold Panda” type of direction. But other times then I think I want to do a remix for someone and it’s not about anything other than just wanting to do it.
Melonie Bayl-Smith: The way that you talk about Gold Panda, as you did just then, do you see where you are going in the next year or so as being directed solely by the Gold Panda identity or that you might diversify from that?
Obviously Gold Panda has gone so well that just to do one album, well, it doesn’t make sense really. I would want to be doing something else as Gold Panda. I mean, there are other things I definitely want to work in the future, but Gold Panda has to be the focus for me for the next couple of years, and I’m happy to do that. Hopefully I can do that well and expand on Gold Panda so that it’s not just the same as the last album. This is without forgetting the original reason I started doing this, which is that I’m interested in sampling, and finding new ways of sampling. Yes, of course there is other stuff I want to do because Gold Panda isn’t “me” if you know what I mean, it’s just an entity. We
ll have to see, I guess.
Gold Panda performs at Sydney Festival 2011, FBi Night at Beck’s Festival Bar, alongside Kyu and Djanimals, on January 14.
