The Range of Electronica, Cathedral to Jubilant
By JON PARELES
Chad Batka for The New York Times
Gold Panda performing at Webster Hall on Friday.
I bookended Friday night with electronica: two Englishmen, Gold Panda and Jon Hopkins, early and the laptopper Baths late. All three traded in disorientation nearly as much as dance beats, but the early shift was far more decorous.
Gold Panda’s set was a ruminative travelogue through a sample library full of exotica: a jet plane landing, tinkling little bells, a non-Western violin, oohing female voices, a raga played on a sitar and joined by singers. The beat drifted in and out — Gold Panda doesn’t worry whether anyone’s dancing — and wasn’t elaborate, usually just a modest midtempo thump: the harmony was mostly minor keys. Ambiance for a serious dinner-party discussion of global affairs.
Jon Hopkins, who collaborates on Brian Eno’s impending album “Small Craft on a Milk Sea,” started with low, slow thuds. He wasn’t going to waste his subwoofers, and soon he’d be doing his version of hip-hop’s gangsta boom-bap, reveling in the elephantine and throwing in some Wu Tang-style static. Up above, though, were far prettier sounds: quasi-Baroque figures, cathedral chords in rounded (and Eno-esque) keyboard tones. With the pomp grounded by the crunch, it suggested a classical education sidetracked by the beat, and Mr. Hopkins wasn’t too arty to wind up with more crowd-pleasing trance bangers.
Baths was noisier and more jubilant. His music bashed and lurched, from a laptop full of untamed sounds. His bass drums were swampy, his snares and tom-toms twitched and ran forward and backward, his beats stumbled and caught themselves as they were jolted by joy-buzzer zaps and whoopie-cushion interruptions. Amid the tipsy momentum, he had overdubbed himself into falsetto chorales that he topped, live, with what was left of his voice after many CMJ sets. “It’s a crazy, beautiful day,” he sang, and made it true.
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