The Bowery Ballroom
Gold Panda

Gold Panda

Shigeto, Beacon

Thu, August 2, 2012

Doors: 8:00 pm / Show: 9:00 pm

The Bowery Ballroom

New York, NY

$15 advance / $18 day of show

Sold Out

This event is 18 and over

Gold Panda
Gold Panda
Hailing from Chelmsford in Essex, but now located to Berlin, Germany, Gold Panda started writing beats and collaborating a few years ago, beginning a journey that ultimately saw him nominated in the BBC’s sound of 2010 list and won the Guardian newspaper’s prestigious First Album Award 2010 for his debut album Lucky Shiner.

Having spent downtime behind the counters of various establishments of ill-repute he consolidated the rest of his hours creating archives of electronic music. He poked his head into the world by way of a collection of instantaneously raved-about remixes, that quickly attracted the interest of various labels, blogs and taste makers, leading to requests for him to re-edit the likes of Telepathe, Bloc Party, Simian Mobile Disco, Health and The Field. In the meantime, Gold Panda began culling his back-archive of material for a series of low key releases: the first was ‘Miyamae’, a 12” on Various, followed by the ‘Quitters Raga’ 7” on Make Mine, and the third, ‘Before’ was released digitally and on 250 limited CDs via Puregroove, all in 2009. In October 2010 Gold Panda released his debut album Lucky Shiner. A culmination of years of work spent refining his sui generis sound, the record was released to huge critical acclaim, culminating in the Guardian First Album award the following year.

Since then he has been touring throughout the world, as well as releasing a DJ Kicks compilation in November 2011, and a handful of additional singles, including last summer’s ltd run Mountain / Financial District 7”.

Gold Panda begins 2013 with the release of the Trust EP – the first full EP he’s released since his pre-Lucky Shiner days. That release will be followed later in the year by his second album.
Shigeto
Shigeto
Artists take on pseudonyms for a multitude of reasons, but in Zach Saginaw's case, those reasons run deeper than most. Zach records under the name Shigeto. It's his middle name; it's also his grandfather's name, a tribute to the Japanese branch of Zach's family tree. Shigeto also means "to grow bigger"—appropriate, given Zach's premature birth-weight of less than a pound. Today, Shigeto stands for Zach's vividly beautiful electronic music. Beat-driven but given to richly textured sound design, rhythmically fractured but melodically sumptuous, Shigeto's music is a bridge between the past and present, bringing the artist face to face with a creative legacy that spans decades.


Zach's body of work has grown over the last few years to the tune of several EPs on Moodgadget as Shigeto and with A Setting Sun, a pair of EPs under the alias Frank Omura (another family-name reference), and remixes for Worst Friends, Praveen & Benoit, Tycho, Mux Mool, Charles Trees, A Setting Sun, Beautiful Bells, Shlohmo, and more. The Semi-Circle EP will be his first release with Ghostly International; the full-length Full Circle is on the horizon. Semi-Circle is a fiercely independent work of art, nominally indebted to instrumental hip-hop but, like Zach, straddling many worlds at once. Cool shades of ambient music, stuttering early IDM, dubstep sub-bass, and jazz melodicism color Shigeto's palette, which he wields with a painterly attention to detail.
Beacon
Beacon
Thomas Mullarney and Jacob Gossett, aka Brooklyn duo Beacon, introduced themselves to the world with the No Body and For Now EPs, both released last year on Ghostly International. The EPs were united by minimalist, R&B-influenced instrumentation, and also by a lyrical theme, with both serving as meditations on the darkness that underpins the most intense of human emotions: love.

The duo's debut album The Ways We Separate both consolidates and develops these ideas. The album focuses, as the title suggests, on the idea of separation — both within the context of relationships and in a more intimate, psychological sense. As Mullarney explains, "The narrative contained inside The Ways We Separate deals with two kinds of separation: one where two entities grow apart, and the other where we grow apart from ourselves. Over the course of a relationship, the two sometimes happen together, one being the result of the other."

Desires, passions and regrets are central to the songs on The Ways We Separate, which take a variety of perspectives to construct a nuanced reflection on the album's central theme. 'Between the Waves' draws a clever analogy between relationships and soundwaves falling out of phase: "I know all the ways we separate/ Where we start to fade at different frequencies." 'Overseer' catalogues a parting of the ways with discomfiting clarity: "Isn't it fine?/ Taking it slow?/ Watching you watch me walk out your door." And album closer 'Split in Two' explores how th extremes of love and loss can take you far away from being the person you thought you were, making explicit the connection between the two ideas of separation: "What I'd do for you?", sings Thomas Mullarney, "Split myself in half/ Divided into two."

Musically, The Ways We Separate finds Beacon working with a richer sonic palette than ever before —as Gossett says, "The production on this album is much more expansive than anything we’ve done thus far. We spent a lot of time exploring new gear and experimenting with how to pull a wide range of sound out of various instruments. Some of the key sonics that shaped this LP are analogue synthesis, lots of heavily processed guitar work, and vocal layering/processing." While the abiding mood remains that of late-night introspection, the production draws from elements of hip hop and a wide gamut of electronic music, marrying intricate beats and subtle textures to honeyed pop melodies that belie the album's conceptual depth. Rarely has bleakness sounded so pretty — this is a record that's deceptively, compellingly beautiful, an exploration of a place both discomfiting and darkly seductive.
Venue Information:
The Bowery Ballroom
6 Delancey St
New York, NY, 10002
http://www.boweryballroom.com/