Named after either the Terry Gilliam movie or the Men At Work live album…
[Video][Website]
[5.75]
Alex Ostroff: A cavalcade of endlessly blooming, wondrous sounds, undercut so perversely and deliberately by the vocal sample that I’m almost tempted to award points for chutzpah.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Repeating the title as if it functioned like an incantation that summoned the exotic, this track takes a while to get past the percussive pitter-patter into Four Tet synth glide bliss while never quite shaking the aura of a New Age gift shop with lit incense.
[5]
Will Adams: The production here is wonderful. Gold Panda zones in on a synthetic woodblock and applies a rapid echo with heavy feedback. It’s an amazing trick that takes the woodblock from a tinny blip to something that fills the sonic field. But there are hundreds of better vocal samples out there, and the anonymous dude’s off-key blathering gets in the way of the all of the lovely sounds.
[6]
Anthony Easton: This is electronic in a way that is so abstracted from the organic, and so profoundly against any real sense of the inorganic it seems metallic or cold or abusive. It used to be that the decorative ornament was abstracted from nature, and it still seems rare that decorative ornaments can be abstracted from anything that is not natural.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: Years ago, in college the first time, one of my dormmates recited her family’s 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall variant for long car trips: (deadpan, in rhythm) “There are cows in the meadow. There are cows in the meadow. There are cows in the field. There are cows in the field. There are cows by the street….” (Rural car trips, clearly.) This is like a bored variant of that bored variant. And it’s suspect how these laptop landscapes always mention Brazil or Latin America and never, like, Lumberton.
[5]
Patrick St. Michel: Scattered across the Gold Panda song catalog are numbers titled after countries. “India Lately,” “Same Dream China,” “Greek Style,” even the vague “Long Vacation.” Then there are tracks like “Quitter’s Raga,” which use a glitchy sample of Indian singing to establish location. What’s impressive about these songs is how they never settle for simple cultural tourism – Gold Panda certainly incorporates sounds from each locale into these moments, but they always reminded me of being in an unfamiliar place and just being a bit overwhelmed by everything. It’s like dashing through a local market or riding a train through snowy, alien hills while drowsy. “Brazil” does not, to my knowledge, feature anything that makes it sound Brazilian, but instead just captures the rush of being somewhere new (conveyed by the skittering electronics and general wooziness, especially of the vocal sample). It’s a song frequently distracted…I like the sound of the water droplet falling, a tiny detail you might notice while running around a city…but also eventually in awe of it’s surroundings. Turns out Gold Panda is one of our past travel guides going.
[8]
Iain Mew: Gold Panda still has a way with hypnotic unreality. The beat here that rattles like video game table tennis speeding up past the physically possible is a fine example, and combines with harps blissfully. The vocal sample, though, keeps dragging “Brazil” back to dull reality. It’s a disappointing distraction when his music can conjure places in a way that mere word association can’t hope to.
[6]
Brad Shoup: Dude, Brazil hung up.
[3]