Hot Press Meets Gold Panda

English producer Gold Panda, aka Derwin Schlecker, has delivered one of the finest albums of the year in Half Of Where You Live. It’s an impressive mix of thumping grooves and more down-tempo, ambient tunes. The record was strongly influenced by Schlecker’s visit to Brazil, a country which made such an impact on him that he ended naming one of the songs after the country.

“South America in general is insane, it’s brilliant,” he enthuses. “It’s one of the places that really made an impact on me. My girlfriend’s from Peru, so I spent some time in Lima and drove her mum’s car around the city and stuff. It just feels like a brand new experience. Then in Sao Paolo, the mix of people... you’re staying in a fancy hotel, and then the building opposite is just full of squatters. And it’s in the middle of a fancy area, but also not that fancy. I don’t know, I can’t explain it, but it’s a weird mix of people with money and people with no money living side by side.
“It’s just a bustling metropolis really. It looks kind of similar to Tokyo, but without any of the neon. And I’m also guided by the records that I find and the music that I sample. There’s a lot of coincidence on this album. I don’t how much I can make instrumental electronica represent the things I want it to without naming it something obvious.”
Half Of Where You Live is the follow-up to Schlecker’s 2010 debut Lucky Shiner, which was met with considerable critical praise and received a Mercury nomination. However, whilst doing the promotional rounds for the record, he said in an interview that he didn’t know whether he should continue to make music.
“Sometimes I feel like that,” he admits. “Rather than the career going downhill, I’d rather just quit on a high. I don’t want to keep trying to do shows in ten years where people aren’t interested, and I’m still DJing and people don’t want to come. That’s more of a confidence thing. I got pissed off with the expectations about the second album and what I should be doing. I’d feel like, ‘Why am I even bothering? Why am I putting all this pressure on myself? Maybe I should just get a job.’ It was like, I’d made one album that people like, so what’s wrong with that? Why do I have to do more?
“In the end I just made more music and that was it really, it was a natural thing. Once I stopped worrying about how I made another track like that, it was fine. The success of the first album took me by surprise, and then I was waiting for people to go, ‘Yeah, I don’t like this new one, it’s rubbish.’ I did it by not trying to do the same thing twice. It definitely exists, that pressure on the second album, and getting it wrong can easily happen.”
Thankfully, Schlecker has got it wonderfully right with Half Of Where You Live, and says that the live shows have also become more enjoyable.
“I tried to do some dancier stuff,” he says of the album. “In the beginning, I didn’t intend to do dance music, and then I when I started playing live, I was like, ‘Shit, why are people dancing?’ But I played London recently and it was brilliant. I played pretty much 85 minutes solid at a dancey tempo, and that’s more fun to do at the moment. My albums aren’t really like that, so to go more in that direction live has been good.”
Of late, EDM has become a big deal in the US thanks to the success of Skrillex and other producers. Personally, I find Skrillex misses a lot of what makes dance music interesting. What’s Derwin’s take on the situation?
“I think if I was ten or 15 years younger, then I’d enjoy it,” he replies. “You have a different experience with music at a certain age, so I don’t know how I would feel if I heard Skrillex for the first time and that was my introduction to electronic music. At the same time, if I remember correctly, when I got into hip hop, I was into some really terrible stuff, which then led me on to good stuff. Apart from maybe Jessie J, most music has a good thing about it.”