About

A TAV Curator’s Pick.

As a musician that has enjoyed both the acclaim and also the cognitive confusion of touring the world and selling out shows in LA, New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, London and many places in between, The past few years have seen Gold Panda concluding that the core of his life and resulting comforts are rooted at home. Driven by destinct desire for normalcy and structure, it’s something that he feels he achieved while making this record. “I mean, probably most 35 year old people don’t live with their Grandmother”, he laughs, “but I could lead a somewhat normal daily routine. Which I really missed.”

Stepping back two years though, the inspiration for the record and its creation are two distinctly different things. “Good Luck And Do Your Best’ was initially planned to be something else entirely. Early in 2014 Derwin set out back to Japan for the first of a pair of trips – the latest of many visits to the place he holds most dear. This time a photographer, Laura Lewis, accompanied him as Derwin’s plan was to collect both audio – field recordings from his trip across the country – and visuals, with Laura tasked to capture what they saw and encountered together. The idea was to be able to put together something other than a traditional record; a sight and sound documentary of his time there, but the expedition ended up being the basis of a new record.

It began with an album title. “Halfway through the first trip we bought rail tickets and rode across the country and went to Hiroshima”. Derwin explains. “One afternoon we had taken a taxi, and as we got out, the Japanese taxi driver’s parting words to us as we left, in English, was ‘good luck and do your best’.

As a result of that chance interaction, Derwin says, he had the title for an album as well as a starting basis. “once you have a title, for me, things come together a lot easier for what it’s going to be.” Struck by the phrase, he ended up being led by the experience to make a record that was, to him “quite motivational, quite positive.” - City Slang

“Gold Panda's warm and exuberant new album sounds quite unlike any of the electronic music being made in 2016, and is refreshingly unfashionable in that way.” - Pitchfork

“Better considered as an 11-track experience than a conventional record, Good Luck and Do Your Best is a work of admirable consistency and tonal clarity. Even tracks as different as the club-ready “Chiba Nights” and the ponderous, melodically spare “I Am Real Punk” feel bound together by a sense of time, place, and mood. Indeed, all of these songs seem to plant your feet in a new setting where humans fade into the background and sound-organisms dominate. Once there, it’s a hard setting to leave.” - PopMatters

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