lawrence - the night will last forever
lawrence's debut album comprises solely of minimal, deep and warm synthetic machine made grooves, some down tempo (the gorgeous title track), others a little more club based (check out the current single 'swap' which i believe has some fine mixes for the dance floor), with the odd ambient interlude to round off the overall experience. the instrumentation is the usual kind of electronic clicks and bleeps with synths in the background fleshing out the harmonies all held together with some amazing subsonic bass tones, but send these passages of music through your headphones (a necessity for this album), and a whole manner of subtle nuances are added to the sonic textures, whether it's an echo/reverb effect in the faraway distance, or a stolen vocal line, there is a steady supply of minor but highly effective left hand turns keeping the interest factor strong. having not heard this type of bleep-y techno since the early warp years, i must say that this album really did bring a smile to my face and make me want to root around in my archive for that classic b12 album. special mentions for the totally fantastic 'attracted by fire' with its simple melody which progressively adds layers of noises and bassbooms throughout the 5 minutes before getting to a wonderful break at 5 minutes when lawrence goes all dub-tastic all in all giving immense aural excitement along the way, and not a cheesy trance 4/4 trick anywhere.
12 tracks of deep detroit styled techno can often become a weary exercise in listener tolerance testing, however, lawrence, who is actually known as peter m. kersten and is from hamburg if you must know these things, has avoided many of the genres usual pitfalls by making his album very listenable, melody rich, and really quite special.