News My Panda Shall Fly

If there has ever been a sign of the times in music then it is this: four years ago, a three piece act trawled around London making ambient IDM without making too many waves. In 2011, the name lives on, but with only one member remaining – My Panda Shall Fly might have a name straight from the MySpace era, but the tunes that he makes certainly aren’t.

Real name Suren Seneviratne, MPSF make music that most would shove into that post-dubstep void of anything marginally exciting that uses a laptop, but terming him as a bass producer seems to fit more comfortably. The queue of people lining up to put their own visions on Suren’s tracks is impressive – Nightwave, Dam Mantle and Throwing Snow have already had their turns – but even more so is that none have managed to better the original of which they’re altering.

Perhaps where he differs from his peers is the ability to take the listener on journey with his music, each being dreamy in the sense that they’re wordless, intangible collections of feeling manifesting themselves as beeps and smatterings of synth. ‘XEROX’ illustrates it best – an ambitious, if terse, start descends into confusion, a little bit of chaos, sinks into the downbeat and depressed before finishing on a muted high – kind of like a normal weekday for most people. It speaks more than anything Morrissey has done in the last decade without using a single word – although it’s more tempting to think of what Mozza could do with a synth than debate how deep Suren could be if he started with lyrics. That’s an issue for another day.