Music Video: Marriage by Gold Panda

London-based electronic artist Gold Panda has quickly gained notoriety in the two years since his self-released début EP Before landed in 2009. Now signed to Ghostly International, GP (real name Derwin Panda) has put together a steady following and a full solo album, Lucky Shiner, which came out in October of 2010. Quitters Raga, a slightly bipolar beat which sounds like a cross between M.I.A. and Passion Pit, was named among the estimable Pitchfork’s top 100 tracks of ’09, and Panda’s star seems to be firmly on the rise.

Upcoming single Marriage, a terrific, upbeat track using everything from Tom Vek-esque synth chords to jet engines to ancient oriental instruments, is shortly to headline an EP featuring a quartet of remixes, but the video for the song is already out there to be enjoyed. It’s a decidedly abstract piece, following the plights of several Chinese lanterns through a normal day.

We see vignettes of people carrying different coloured lanterns up escalators, through car parks, at work, even on the ocean, and are invited to interpret these brief segments of film however we please. As Marriage builds to its layered climax, the lanterns are all brought together to the backdrop of fireworks, which makes for a somewhat strange, but also bizarrely uplifting finale. Director Ronni Shendar has an artist’s eye for colours and composition, and her portraits of everyday folk are beguilingly captured without being overwrought or excessively stylised.

It’s a very unfussy video, but its simple charm and brilliantly straightforward central concept make it a joyous 4 minute salute to colour and creativity.

Luke Grundy is a fervent assimilator of media living amid the bright lights of London, England. If he’s not watching films or listening to music, he’s probably asleep, eating or dead. An aspiring writer, journalist and musician, he is the creator of movie/music blog Odessa & Tucson and lives for epistemology.