The English electronic music virtuoso heated up Copenhagen’s Rust club last Friday night with soundscapes from his latest album as well as his well-known hits.
Gold Panda was playing his set alongside other DJs as a part of the fifth birthday party celebration of the music blog Regnsky. The party kicked off with Danish electronic duo Taragana Pyjarama as support, who delivered some fine tunes and piqued the audience’s interest in just the right musical direction. When the curtains opened for the second time, Gold Panda emerged from underneath the turntables as a black ninja and started the show straight away with his latest single We Work Nights. As the song progressed, the intricately layered sound shaped an outline of a cityscape. When played live, Gold Panda’s music takes on a 3D form so one can easily imagine dark skyscrapers rising from his drum pad controller and the bass, which is much more present than in his recordings.
Continuing in the path of soundscaping he transitioned to Brazil, another single from his latest LP Half of Where You Live which was created as a city album that represents the places he visited while on tour; and his shows resemble a trip around the globe indeed. From the sunny streets of South America to the crowded cities in India, Gold Panda is not afraid to experiment with his own music. As if it wasn’t difficult enough to define his sound already, he dived into noise and experimental interpretations of his songs in the middle of the show, but kept the audience going and enjoying themselves by turning up the bass.
His most popular melodies – You and Quitter’s Raga – resonated at the end of the set and turned out to be clear crowd pleasers as well. Unfortunately, as much as Gold Panda’s set was masterful, it lacked that clean and crispy sound that is present in his recordings, but it was mostly due to Rust’s small concert space that is not very suited for performing extremely detailed electronic music. In spite of that, people left the concert very happy and pleased and you would have been too after experiencing the magic of Gold Panda.