Deliaphonic Presents: Panda Bear & Sonic Boom
23/04/2023
7:30 pm - 11:00 pm
£22.00 + Booking Fee
You can thank the ever-arduous process of moving vinyl records for Reset, the ebullient full-length debut from longtime pals and collaborators Panda Bear and Sonic Boom. Six years ago now, Sonic Boom left his home in England for Portugal, at least in part to be closer to Panda Bear. The unlikely pair met via MySpace nearly a decade before, when Panda Bear thanked Sonic Boom’s former band, Spacemen 3, in the liner notes for his solo classic, Person Pitch, prompting Sonic Boom to message him with gratitude of his own.
They forged an enduring partnership, with Sonic Boom mixing and co-producing a spate of Panda Bear releases since 2011’s Tomboy; they worked especially closely on 2015’s Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper. But when Sonic Boom pitched an idea to take their working relationship to the next level, he reckoned Panda Bear might reject the proposition outright—in the nine gloriously, feverishly hook-bound tracks of Reset, though, you can hear exactly how much he loved the prospect.
Sonic Boom’s notion was simple enough: After lugging his records to Portugal, he slapped them on a turntable in a fresh space, renewing his fascination with old favorites he had not heard in years. There was the great early rock singer Eddie Cochran, for instance, or the stunning American harmonizers of The Everly Brothers. Something new struck him, too—the way the ornate intros to many of these standards felt largely like stage curtains, compelling in their own right even if they had very little to do with the hits that followed. Sonic Boom began crafting song-length loops from these preambles, twisting and bending the parts like scrap metal into chimeras.
But would Panda Bear, who had used pop music ephemera to make his own gems even before famously doing so on Person Pitch, be interested into turning them into proper tunes? When Sonic Boom’s version of Cochran’s “Three Steps to Heaven” arrived, with its huge acoustic strums looped like a roller-coaster, Panda Bear knew what to play and sing so instantaneously that the result, “Getting to the Point,” is Reset’s rightful sugar-rush opener. “Like a Coca-Cola in the system,” Panda Bear begins above that magnetic loop, “I’m letting it engineer the atmosphere.” The rest of Reset—40 minutes of strange light, fluorescing out from a particularly dark time—sparkles with the same energy.
Support from Stone Anthem
Working as an experimental composer and performer, Stone Anthem oscillates between the spaces of ambience and sonic exploration he uses sound as a means to understand the human spirit and to push it to the outer limits.
Location
The Box at FarGo
