Gold Panda / Max Tundra @ White Heat, Madame Jojo’s, London

The bottled excitement an audience feels when awaiting the arrival of a DJ could be said to be the purest transfer of energy: there are no awkward ‘is-he-a-roadie-or-has-he-let-himself-go?’ moments to diffuse the situation; no order in which to expect the band to appear (always frontman last, ego!); none of that fiddling about with strings and tuning. No, the DJ takes the weight of this anticipation and refracts it across the room usually within a minute of his entrance.
This is perhaps what initially differentiates the acts tonight. For the first, Glasgow’s Dam Mantle, it’s the culmination of richly-deserved hype come true-appreciation that greets his early set. With a blend of disparate musical reference points, including the fab ‘Broken Slumber’, his is not so much a bolt from the blue as much as a glint of big things in the distance.
Comparatively, Max Tundra is greeted with a degree of suspicion and confusion. His array of instrumental weapons separate him from the remainder of the line up, but is also perhaps what makes him harder to take. That and the fact that he’s offering up interludes of Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’, having just given the greatest excuse for robot dance moves to be cast into the fires of eternal damnation and regret. He musters some funk for ‘Which Song’, and while the falsetto isn’t bad he stands in the uncomfortable void between performer and audience and electronic mess.
Gold Panda on the other hand seems to have furnished a respectable stance behind his decks. Hovering low over them, in an overly-large shirt his mum really should’ve ironed before he left the house, he twists dials and bobs between decks and laptop with unwavering intensity.
With a fairly abrupt style of ending tracks, the likes of ‘You’ crackle with an almost-whispering beat as variably-focussed street scenes flash on the screen behind him, the only thing lighting the room. Hunched (but still gigantic) the DJ comprises his set of entirely GP material – despite his notoriety for the odd remix – and filters in the influences of the Pacific rim in ‘Mayuri’ from the forthcoming Lucky Shiner LP.
Commanding the audience’s respect is one thing, holding their excitement quite another. On the evidence of tonight, some craftsmen are making this seem light work.