Polo & Pan

Polo & Pan are timeless. The Parisian duo rose to global prominence eliciting a summery musical hedonism that flicks like frames through Golden Era Hollywood films — think romance-thrillers in Saint Tropez or love-crossed youth in Rio de Janeiro. With the release of their long-awaited sophomore LP Cyclorama, Polo & Pan further refine their cinematic impressions on house, disco, club, techno, and psychedelia in arrangements that play out like vignettes, abstractions on the motif of voyage that traverse through locales, time, tempo, and the cycles of life. Cyclorama is Polo & Pan fully realized: hedonism matured, sounds fine-tuned, scope broadened. While standouts like “Feel Good” and the ELO-inspired “Magic” are cued up to soundtrack the world’s revelers emerging again into a joyful daylight world, Polo & Pan are also exploring shades of darkness and introspection. “Requiem,” “Jiminy,” and “Tunnel” — the latter a collaboration with the Compton-bred club iconoclast Channel Tres — take the duo’s sonic late into the realm of all-night sessions, awash with brooding mystique. Cyclorama also finds Polo & Pan foraying to the fringes of dancefloor thematics, exploring life, death, and transcendence in tracks like the buoyant and celebratory “Ani Kuni” and the wistful psychedelic ballad ‘Melody.’ Throughout the Cyclorama journey, Polo & Pan offer richer textures, more complex emotions, intrepid collaborations, and surprises like the emergence of Paul Armand-Delille’s dulcet vocals. The album closer “Peter Pan” is a promise that, although Polo & Pan may have matured, they’ll never quite grow up so much that they lose their joyous touch. So while Cyclorama may be a watershed in the scope of the duo’s sound, the feeling the music brings to the dancefloor remains uncompromisingly, inimitably, and undoubtedly Polo & Pan.