Gold Panda

In the future when I look back at the end of 'the noughties' (still cringing) I will probably remember it chiefly for being dominated by 'Best of....' lists. LISTS. Everywhere. The best films of the decade, the best music of the decade, the best 'celebrity moments' of the decade, the best lists of the decade (probably).

And then, just when you were catching up on all the things you'd slept on, along came lists like the BBC's 'Sound of 2010' , a compendium of new and exciting musical talent, as picked out by 165 'tastemakers'. Notable for his inclusion on this list was 'Gold Panda', a Londoner called Derwin who has been steadily building a buzz for himself with a string of EPs over the last year. His keen sense of melody and precise production has drawn inevitable comparisons to Four Tet, but his EPs have showcased a man with plenty of vision and production flair in his own right.

It's on a Saturday afternoon when Derwin shuffles into a pub in Shoreditch, east London, looking somewhat bleary-eyed and sheepish from playing a live set at Fabric the night before. Over a good ol' pint of orange juice the affable 28 year old makes a valiant effort to answer my questions about his origins and how feels about the hype.

Photo: Anneka Lange

How do you deal with playing live to an audience who might expect to dance, where some of your material is quite slow?

I dunno...well I'd like to have more dancey versions [of his songs] I guess. It doesn't have to sound like the record when you're playing it in a club. But then again it depends because later in the year I'll be supporting someone who's quite melodic and folky- it wouldn't make sense to do a banging 45-minute set before them.

I noticed you had a laptop, are you using Ableton?

Yeah. I've got a couple of tracks on there that I just can't do live 'cos they're so mental...well I could- if I spent a lot of time on it I could do it. But I just haven't had the chance to sit there and get all the samples in and when to drop stuff in. And with Ableton- I just see so many people using laptops, I just think it's pretty boring. And I don't like computers anyway so I'd rather just not use it really.

You want to change your live setup?

Yeah just get rid of the laptop totally, just have 3 samplers, a Kaoss Pad, some loop pedals, a reverb or something.....so I can edit pretty much every sample and change a track totally so it becomes something else. I think it would work really well in a 'dance' context, I could drop in drums, drop in a sample, take it out again, extend a track over 8 minutes, so it's not just 'This is the start, this is the end'.

You say you're not a computer person, does that mean you don't produce using computers?

I sequence with an MPC. I started making tracks with an Atari and an Akai sampler, so they're what I'm most comfortable with. And the MPC is Akai as well, so it was a natural changeover. I've used that ever since. Then I started putting my samples into Ableton but the sequencing is done on my MPC. So I just write loads of sequences and when I record it I just play them in an order that I think might work. Everything that I sit and stress over and spend ages on I hate and no-one ever hears it, but the stuff that's done it 10 minutes, a couple of hours or a day always works out really well. I'm quite critical with my own stuff really, too much.