Gold Panda’s 2010 debut, Lucky Shiner, asked you to accept a number of seeming contradictions, echoing some of the great contradictory artists of electronic music as it went along. Like the work of Boards of Canada, its emotion-loaded melodies were both whimsical and mournful. Like the collage-funk productions of Matthew Herbert, it built tracks from a myriad of tiny samples, but warped them so that even field recordings and snippets of analog instruments felt denatured, computerized, alien. The production had the crammed-waveform fullness of the Field’s fluffy maximalist trance epics, but the way GP put his tracks together from all those little bits somehow also recalled the fragile, handmade miniatures of not-quite-dubsteppers Mount Kimbie.
Whether or not GP would claim any or all of those acts as influences or peers, it was clear he was enjoying the same sort of freedom as they did, the freedom of belonging to no one particular electronic music niche. He drew inspiration from sounds as far-flung as the more obvious physicality of London’s ever-evolving beats-and-bass subculture, the twitching and gurgling micro-syncopations of experimental techno, and the shameless and affecting melodicism of IDM. More crucially, he also found ways to layer them into something his own. On GP’s new DJ-Kicks entry, he attempts to fuse these strands of modern dance, just as he did on Lucky Shiner, except this time using mostly other people’s records as raw material. The result is another seeming contradiction, a DJ mix that’s both a pulsing paean to up-to-the-minute club rhythms and a total headphone-dependent feast of electronic sound at its most miniaturized and luscious.
He does this quite simply, pairing left-field bangers with tracks that tend more toward the art-techno end of the spectrum, accentuating the subtleties of the former and teasing out the grooves in the latter. And in the mix’s most effective moments, he mingles them until they create new hybrids, not quite dancefloor ready and always with so much to listen to that you could never call them ambient. GP draws out the strange staggering gait of Bok Bok’s “Charisma Theme”, what might have seemed like a slab of party-ready bashing and clonking in a mix of similar post-dubstep party tunes, by linking it with the more steely, abstract electro of Decay’s “Charisma’s Theme”. He hears a bit of gnarled drums and synthesizer murk, clipped from a Brainiac record of all things, as the perfect perverse segue into Untold and LV’s spartan dubstep. He ranges as far as he ever has on his own records, from Berlin minimal to American indie rock, divining brilliant connections between artists who seem to come from opposing aesthetic universes.
Amazingly, this rarely makes for choppy transitions. Given the wildly disparate materials used to construct it, the bubbling, slurping, rustling flow of this DJ-Kicks is a marvel, the kind of seamless weaving together of tiny sounds into a new tapestry that’s been sadly unfashionable since the days of old-school micro-house mixes. And like vintage micro-house, many of the tracks take minimalism not as an opportunity for acetic reduction but a chance to revel in all the ear candy sound-as-sound qualities of electronic music, without totally skimping on the funk. Tune your ears down to its reductionist frequency, and the vinyl-esque crackle and barely audible hiss of Jan Jelinek’s “If’s, And’s, and But’s” feels as lush and wombing as any massive, bass-booming deep house jam operating on a similarly warm tip. Like the records that make it up, Gold Panda’s DJ-Kicks is too interested in these (often literally) small pleasures and subtle entwinings to say it demands your attention. But in his own dogged, idiosyncratic way, he’s keeping a neglected strain of dance music alive here, and while the joys are subtle, the more attention you give the mix, the deeper they feel.