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t quickly becomes apparent, in conversation with Gold Panda, that we taught English in Japan at the same time. In fact, we were living in nearly exactly the same place, a ten minute train ride from the mania of central Tokyo. “I was always interested in this idea of Tokyo when I was a kid and I never got to see it because it was over before I got there; the bubble had burst,” he explains. “I’d heard crazy stories about people having gold flakes on their ramen noodles and eating sushi off naked women. Crazy shit like that really interested me – a weird hedonism where people were spending money so they didn’t have pay a huge tax bill.” This fascination has come through in his music, perhaps most clearly on ‘Junk City II’, the opening track on his new album ‘Half Of Where You Live’, which he explains reflects recent trips to Japan and was conceived as a hypothetical soundtrack to 90s anime. Yet Japan isn’t the only source of geographical inspiration for the nomadic Gold Panda, who currently calls Berlin home but is often found at all corners of the globe playing music. ‘Half Of Where You Live’ is inspired by his travels doing this exact thing. He describes the record as a “city album” and it’s easy to see why. There’s a feeling of driving through huge metropolises, their overwhelming noise and clutter, their beauty, their harshness. Though it flows with organic vibrancy that was so to the fore on his debut, here there are harsher edges and a keen sense of both space and congestion. On the first track released, ‘Brazil’, he tried to capture the journey from the airport to the hotel. “There are other songs that try to do that, try to capture the kind of overpopulated, smoggy atmosphere of big cities, like driving through Shanghai.” If there is a theme then, it is that of travelling, of creating a sense of place. “I guess from touring and travelling I didn’t have anything else to name music about so I just ended up naming tracks after places I’d been or things I was interested in, whether those places were imaginary or real. So there are a few themes in there because you’re away from home, in other places. You just get a snapshot of a place whenever you play a show. You fly in and maybe you have time to see something – for example in Pisa I saw the Leaning Tower of Pisa for about five minutes and that was it.”
F r o m T o k y o t o B e r l i n : D a n n y W r i g h t a n d G o l d P a n d a t a k e a
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