It’s Light Night in Leeds tonight, and, presumably unbeknownst to Gold Panda or his booking agent, this is really quite a fitting multimedia performance. A set of consistent, relentless four-to-the-floor techno can often fall short outside of a dancefloor environment; this is no Warehouse Project, this is the Brudenell Social Club – fit to burst in its attendance tonight – and Gold Panda, live, draws out and merges his tracks in a way that’s more suited on the face of it to the dark, sex-drenched anonymity of a rave than how they are presented on record. There are a number of aspects of tonight’s set, however, that inject more substance into it than that. One is the range of equipment used, more eclectic than the majority of electronic musicians and DJs that predominantly channel their energy through software and hide behind an apple all the while. Old school apparatus such as an Akai MPC2000XL (so it is documented) makes for a slightly rough-edged audio quality and an unquantised off-kilter pulse as Panda inputs rhythms and MIDI info live, with his bare fingers. This also brings a more humanised presence to the table than a lot of live dance music ordinarily can.
Another gambit (the most substantial) dispelling any potential for thumb-twiddling in lieu of a dancefloor is the compelling accompaniment of projected visuals throughout. Such is the craft and intricacy of the visual element that it carries as much artistic weight as the audio. The opening few tracks are set to cinematic footage of tides and waves, ebbing and flowing concurrently with the musical meanderings. Another particularly affecting set of footage is high speed, very HD capture of foliage, creating a profoundly “natural” atmosphere alongside a drawn out plane of synth pads. This feel is juxtaposed with a more urban angle further into the set; rapid, glitchy rotation of stills – concrete, buildings, structures specifically chosen to exemplify artificiality, industry and mordernisation. What makes this contrast more powerful, visually, is the consistent mood and pace of the music; the music contains both pastoral synth sounds and shiny, glitchy electronics but Panda refrains from explicitly attributing them to the nature and artificiality, respectively, in the choice of visuals. This equal poeticising of the artificial and the natural is refreshing and comforting. Elsewhere, Lucky Shiner opener ‘You’ is appropriately adorned with a visual bombardment of the word “you” in various contexts whilst distractingly intricate splicing of spoken samples “you” and “me” is scattered over the music.
Whether or not the visual element single-handedly renders such a dance set appropriate for a small indie venue, rather than a club, is questionable, but those who know the recorded material well – myself included – have the very satisfying element of familiarity to fall back on, which with tracks this strong makes for an engrossing show.