He’s not exactly one to embrace the conventional – he used to work at a sex shop – but the establishment sure is willing to embrace him. Derwin, the man behind Gold Panda, has garnered accolades from the likes of Pitchfork and NME for his remixes and EPs; but all this praise leaves him slightly nonplussed.
‘It feels weird that I’ve had such a good response, such good press’, he says, comfortably ensconced in a black leather armchair. ‘I feel like there might be a point where it’ll turn around and collapse. The good thing is that a hobby has become a career, a job that I can do and enjoy and not have to worry about wearing a suit or going to work’.
Derwin is indeed highly preoccupied with his work-wear. With his skinny jeans, ubiquitous indie t-shirt and requisite trucker cap, he blends right into the crowds at Washington D.C.’s notoriously indie club The Black Cat, where I meet him. But it hasn’t always been this comfortable for the DJ.
A few years ago, Derwin spontaneously left his home in Essex, selling his entire record collection, to study Japanese at the School of African and Oriental Studies in London. ‘I was pretty obsessed with Japanese stuff’, he explains. ‘At the same time, I was thinking, ‘Aww, I’ve gotta work, I’ve gotta buy a house’. So I tried to get a job in a bank, something using Japanese. So I’d come back from an interview, wearing a suit and shoes and I’d just put my shoes in the bin and be, like, ‘What the fuck am I doing? I’m not interested in any of these jobs’. I just gave up looking, basically.’
Derwin’s, who only began making music in 2008, is a rookie. He got his start remixing bands like Simian Mobile Disco and Bloc Party, but with the encouragement of Wichita Records, he moved onto producing original material. The BBC included Gold Panda in its longlist for the ‘Sound of 2010’; when I bring this up, however, it only elicits a generous murmur of ‘whatever’s from the man. In fact, Derwin’s subsequent assertion that his music is more along the lines of ‘the sound of 1998 or something’ is telling: Gold Panda just doesn’t really care about the boundaries of time.
Lucky Shiner, his recent debut album, proves his point. Its thrillingly eclectic sources of inspiration – we can hear the zither’s whine, the shaman’s wail, and the taxi’s whiz – are broken down and reassembled into perfectly melodious compositions. They’re anything but 2010. But the album is also a highly personal one. The crescendo of the jingle-jangle in ‘You’ and the svelte sense of urgency thrumming in ‘Snow & Taxis’ hint at the complexity of the man inside his shell of music.
For a start, he hates performing and tends to dislike his own material. ‘I think I’m pretty far behind a lot of people’, he confessed. ‘I’ve listened to a lot of other electronic music and I think, ‘Why am I making this basic, stupid music when people are creating more interesting, intelligent stuff?’. People like Mount Kimbie, they’re really great… I just feel like maybe my music is a bit childish compared to what I listen to’.
His thoughts on branding are similarly disenchanted: “Someone mentioned recently, ‘If you want to make a living out of [Gold Panda] you should get a brand going’: ‘Gold Panda’ this, ‘Gold Panda’ that… I suppose that’s a part of it, it’s a business, but I don’t know if I’m really into that. I mean, it seems like things are just going well for me anyway. It’s just like Gold Panda is this thing that people can enjoy. It doesn’t have to be a brand”.
So what’s the key to his success? ‘Luck,’ he says. The establishment begs to differ.
