So in continuing my tangential love affair with that Pantha du Prince LP, which I feel entirely unable to write about, here is instead another record that might not change lives but will totally manipulate the same part of your heart. To make this as literal and obvious as possible, I first heard about Lawrence in the Other Music review of “This Bliss”, which favorably compared the two, especially in terms of melody.
The new-ish CD “Lowlights from the Past and Future” is a collection of new and old Lawrence tracks, they’re mostly mixes for other artists and maybe taken from singles or something? Almost all of the songs are licensed from somewhere else, and the “greatest misses” style pun in the title (“lowlights,” not “highlights”, get it?) suggests that this set documents a distinct past, something that may be over at this point. The cover photo is appropriately hazy, tinted the loveliest turquoise blue, immediate nostalgia for an artificial past, like how I always wanted Morr Music releases to look.
It might take a minute or two for them to develop, but every single song on “Lowlights” has a really solid backbone; all pulsing, warm, and supremely dominant beats that don’t ask you to dance but do propel you. It’s not an immediate hook for me, and I know a lot of people who dismiss that sound pretty easily. Look, here is the deal; I grew up punk and this kind of downbeat, “chill out” electronica can sometimes drive me insane, reminds me of expensive, post-modern bars with too many lights glowing under the floor, under the mirrors and under the molded plastic bar.
But I like being moved, always, and the delicate, crystallized spirals of these songs feel like tiny hands inside my chest, coaxing and calming my heart, riling up my breath and occasionally disturbing everything with a sudden rough edge. The Lawrence remix of “The Morning” by Antonelli builds for eight minutes to this incredible hush of ringing chimes that somehow recalls every childhood memory involving a carousal as the happiest of my life. Many of the songs get a little too far out into orbit for me, but the ones that are well-grounded make me feel so happy and wet-eyed emotional that I’m so glad to have heard this record.
But the track I want to discuss is the one that I think is easiest to grasp, for the simple reason that this gentle, utterly familiar progression of guitar chords provides the foundation for the song. I’ve never heard the original cut, but my guess is the vocals and guitar are plucked right from it, the rest of the song left behind. But I could be totally wrong. If I guessed right though, the deftness that Lawrence grafts the crisp humanity of these gestures to his feather-soft beats with is a remarkable gift.
You don’t get the guitar right away though, the song begins with an airy, cool drift of sound, the same soft handed tones that chime through most of his songs, with tiny synthetic wormy sounds buried deep below, corkscrewing to the surface every once in awhile with an unsettling whirr.
It’s nearly two minutes into the track before the guitar appears, and then only if you’re listening for it. As it gently fades in, growing in fullness and warmth, the synthesized tones fall away, and for a couple of bars, these major chords strum away like a Joni Mitchell song. Then weird things start to happen. The guitar stutters, like it’s doubled up badly; the futuristic windharps resume their emotional wail and the tiny computer rhythms return, but the guitar can’t keep up, instead veering and shuddering. The electronic sounds stay intact and steady while the guitar fractures and phases out of sound, like a sick thing. Eventually it disappears. But the sickness caught hold, and the electronic sounds now shift and swell with an uneasing grace. There’s a part where the main bass rhythm is transposed half an octave up, and for the one-and-a-half seconds it takes it’s about the most sickening feeling you can have.
Did you ever have a dual cassette deck? With high-speed dubbing? Ever turn the high speed dubbing on or off while copying a tape? I did, it was during the Cream song “Sunshine of Your Love” and I was in 6th grade. For the half a bar that the two tapes were out of sync, the one being played speeding up at a slightly different rate than the one being recorded, it felt like a fucking Caroliner record. Like this seasick lunge of self-correction that just felt worse for the attempt. I listened to the tape on the walk to school every morning and felt queasy and bad-touched for the rest of the song, eventually taping over it.
That’s how the transposed notes make me feel, and it’s such a subtly jarring transition I probably shouldn’t even mention it, should let you discover the uneasy pull inside your guts on your own, or worse, just let you feel bad for no discernable reason. The fact that it lurks in these amazingly melodic, gentle and resonant cuts is unbelievably sinister and quite clever to me, like the best trick of the year. Or maybe I’m just over sensitive and paranoid.
In the last minute of the song, it seems like every bit of sound encountered during the cut returns to coyly demonstrate just how harmonically in tune they all actually are, even the careening, glitching guitar, even the perfectly round bell tones, even the tiny air bubble rhythms, even the demanding, bass-hard beats. Not a single one clashes, and despite any hard feelings, it’s a moment of triumph and positive memory. It’s the same nostalgic quality lent by the cover, a reflection on something more imagined than existent, yet so firmly engaging and well-loved there’s no avoiding its impact. And once “Aranda” has you open to those charmed, overwhelming tones, you’ll fall right in love with the rest of it.
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