>Today’s New Band might well garner tons of critical acclaim – and worse, may be burdened with being flavour-of-the-month cool. It’d be a shame, because Gold Panda makes music that deserves to end up in better places than an audio montage on Skins.

Making music from bits and pieces of other things is nothing new, but most attempts just serve to reveal the lack of artistry on the part of the composer, leaving us with ham-fisted cobbled-together mental chewing gum. Gold Panda, however, has got it right.

In Long Vacation, vividly hear a song so infused with the clarity of its own vision that it pulses with life. Here, Gold Panda is sweetly massaging your mind with his sounds and then periodically pricking your attention to make sure you give him your full attention.

Quitters Raga is a fractured song-morsel, taking droning Eastern music and cracking it into bits, before lovingly reassembling it so that it is almost the same as before – but not quite. Like Totally, minimal to the point of almost resembling background noise, fades in from and back to silence so subtly that you won’t realises you’ve just heard something lovely until it has gone.

Gold Panda dips his hands into God’s Black Binliner of Music, pulls out the scraps most people would leave behind, and forces them to coagulate into something smooth, soft and surprising. A bit like a deep-fried Mars Bar. Except that listening to Gold Panda won’t give you heart disease. Listen here!