Gold Panda Artist Bio

Derwin Schlecker (born Derwin Dicker, 1980), professionally known as Gold Panda, is an English electronic record producer and songwriter.

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 newspapers 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 of 2010, Gold Panda released his debut album Lucky Shiner. A culmination of years of work spent refining his sound, the record was released to huge critical acclaim, culminating in the Guardian’s 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 summers 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.

For 2013, dates have already been announced in New Zealand and Australia, Singapore, USA, Canada, Mexico, the UK and central Europe. He will be performing at Barcelonas legendary forward-thinking music festival Sonar, for the first time this summer, having already appeared at the likes of Primavera, Glastonbury, Melt Festival, Roskilde, Hove, Latitude and Sasquatch festivals across the world in the last couple of summers. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.