Autumn's Perfect Soundtracks: Lawrence, The Absence of Blight | Sten: Leaving the Frantic
Lawrence is Peter M. Kersten and Peter M. Kersten is Sten. Mr Kersten is known as Pete to his friends and those familiar with him. He has frequent appearances behind the decks at the Golden Pudel Club (www.pudel.com) and at Click (www.click808.com), both institutions known far beyond the borders of Hamburg, the latter, in my humble opinion, one of the country’s first addresses for finest electronic music at present. Mr Kersten, who studies Cultural Sciences at the university of Lüneburg, a small, picturesque town about half an hour by train from Hamburg, is easily recognized by his shock of dark hair and his prominent eyebrows. He is polite, with a calm face and a pleasant, sympathetic smile. He invariably fills the floor and his evenings at Click are among the best I’ve experienced in the last year.
Mr Kersten is the co-owner, with David Lieske (known to his friends as Dave and to afficionados of fine beats as Carsten Jost) of a record label, Dial Records (www.dial-rec.de). That by itself may not be much of a surprise, as quite a number of DJs and producers operate their own labels, but Dial has the ambition to make politics, leftist, anti-fascist politics (known in Germany as, what else, Antifa)- a factor in the Techno scene, which is notoriously apolitical. As almost the only political demand from this scene has been for the legalization of various substances effective in mind-and-pleasure-enhancement and in view of the fact that most of those active in Antifa activities (centered, in Hamburg, in the derelict Rote Flora theatre in the city’s Schanzenviertel) listen to Dub, HipHop, Punk, Reggae and Ska (everything, in short, but Techno), it appears to be a difficult task, to say the least. Of the label’s artist, I’d like to mention Pantha du Prince, whose album ‘Diamond Daze’ is excellent indeed (my favourite track is ‘Suzan’). The Pantha is better known as Hendrik Weber, bass player for Stella, Hamburg’s Hip Pop Supergroup. I’m not quite sure what that means exactly, but the reader may ask SPEX (www.spex.de) magazine, the nation’s self-proclaimed (and, indeed, undisputed) authority in all matters hip and pop.
Lawrence is much in demand as a remixer and his work in that field includes ‘Das Lied vom einsamen Mädchen’ from Depeche Mode’s Martin L. Gore’s album 'Counterfeit 2' and, recently, Superpitcher’s 'Happiness' and Quarks’ ‘Du entkommst mir nicht’. Very nice, though I have to admit that I like the Antonelli Electric remix better. Perhaps that’s because I don’t like Jovanka von Willsdorf’s voice and Antonelli Electric have kept the vocal samples at a minimum.
When Lawrence’s second album, 'The Absence of Blight', was issued last autumn, it appears that much consultation of dictionaries occured in regard to the word ‘blight’ and attempts were made by different reviewers to interpret the title and set it in relation to the music and Mr Kersten. Much interpretation was also undertaken of the artwork and this is, I think, a better key to the music. Ten bleak black and white photographs, seven depicting weeds struggling in desolate, hostile urban surroundings, three views of sunlit post acid-rain German forests and meadows. Weeds that have broken through cracks in the pavement, grow against the wall of what appears to be a junk-filled backyard, have taken over large concrete municipal flowerpots abundant in German cities, one of them on a rail pallet, a small tree at the dead end of a line of track. Blight is a disease of plants, among other meanings, and Mr Kersten apprenticed as a gardener prior to his studies at Lüneburg university.
Hamburg is Germany’s largest port and one of the largest in Europe, in direct competition with Rotterdam. From here the goods arrived by container are distributed, by truck and by rail, to destination all over the country and Europe. In the south of Hamburg, near industrial Harburg, there is a huge wasteland of tracks, acre upon acre of parallel tracks, illuminated by hundreds of sodium arc lights, whose orange glow lights up the night sky and is visible from miles away when one approches Hamburg on the A1 (Autobahn 1) from the south in the dark. It is photographs of this view, again in black and white, that constitute the artwork on Sten’s album, 'Leaving the Frantic', issued on 9 October.
Two connected panels on the front of the inlay show a seemingly endless freight train, each car loaded with one container of COSCO, the national Chinese shipping line, twenty of which grow smaller from right to left and recede from view. On the back of the inlay, five connected panels show the upper part of a number of the lights mentioned. The emotion I associate with all of these pictures, on both albums, is melancholy. And this is a very apt word to describe the emotional content of both Lawrence’s and Sten’s music.
As Lawrence, Mr Kersten produced House, as Sten minimalistic Techno. Lawrence has been described as music to wallow in your depression to, Sten as music to dance to. In an interview with Sami Khatib, published in the December 2003 issue of de:bug magazine (www.de-bug.de) Mr Kersten describes the difference thus:
‘Lawrence is my concrete artistic being. Sten is much more abstract, not devoid of emotion, but more a minimal Club-Techno project. I have separated the two, because it is a more relaxed way of working. Sten tracks are relatively quick work, while I work very long on Lawrence tracks. But sometimes I know only subsequently whether a current production is a Lawrence or a Sten track.’ Asked how he defines this, Mr Kersten replied: ‘That’s a very simple decision that I have to make then. Should people listen to it or dance to it? It would be ideal, of course, to dance while listening. ... Sten gives me the possibilty to simply ‘fire away’. I am, after all, not only the multilayered, melancholy Lawrence.’
This arbitrary division is far from exact (and probably can’t be exact): there are tracks on ‘The Absence of Blight’ that are eminently danceable, while a number of the tracks on ‘Leaving the Frantic’ are both melancholy and multilayered despite a 4/4 beat. Sten’s brillant ‘From a Spire’ is almost a continuation of Lawrence’s ‘Neighbourhood’, both of which tickle the hips and yet evoke, through simple organ chords, a sense of nostalgia and sadness. These organ chords appear on a number of tracks on ‘Leaving the Frantic’.
Four of the tracks on ‘Leaving the Frantic’ have been previously available as 12 inches on Dial, a fifth on Sender Records. The vinyl version of the album includes two bonus tracks not on the CD.
My favourites, apart from the two tracks mentioned, are Lawrence’s ‘Fifteen Minutes with You’ (a beautiful love song, in my view), Sten’s opener, ‘Back Four’, with the shift in the last third (others would have made two separate tracks out of this), ‘Eccentric’, ‘Are You A Doctor’ (which would be the question to ‘I Am Not A Doctor’, Moloko’s second album) and ‘Frost’, a track to drive to through Northern Germany’s monotonous flat landscape in winter- endless fields of earth frozen solid, solitary trees.
In Hamburg, there are sections of the lines where the underground trains travel overground, much like New York City’s famous Elevated. In one particular section, with the vast port on the left and the hypermodern architecture of one of Germany’s largest magazine publishing houses on the right, under a leaden sky, I thought that if I were to set these images to music, both Lawrence and Sten would be perfect.
Five Stars (both)
Mr Kersten is the co-owner, with David Lieske (known to his friends as Dave and to afficionados of fine beats as Carsten Jost) of a record label, Dial Records (www.dial-rec.de). That by itself may not be much of a surprise, as quite a number of DJs and producers operate their own labels, but Dial has the ambition to make politics, leftist, anti-fascist politics (known in Germany as, what else, Antifa)- a factor in the Techno scene, which is notoriously apolitical. As almost the only political demand from this scene has been for the legalization of various substances effective in mind-and-pleasure-enhancement and in view of the fact that most of those active in Antifa activities (centered, in Hamburg, in the derelict Rote Flora theatre in the city’s Schanzenviertel) listen to Dub, HipHop, Punk, Reggae and Ska (everything, in short, but Techno), it appears to be a difficult task, to say the least. Of the label’s artist, I’d like to mention Pantha du Prince, whose album ‘Diamond Daze’ is excellent indeed (my favourite track is ‘Suzan’). The Pantha is better known as Hendrik Weber, bass player for Stella, Hamburg’s Hip Pop Supergroup. I’m not quite sure what that means exactly, but the reader may ask SPEX (www.spex.de) magazine, the nation’s self-proclaimed (and, indeed, undisputed) authority in all matters hip and pop.
Lawrence is much in demand as a remixer and his work in that field includes ‘Das Lied vom einsamen Mädchen’ from Depeche Mode’s Martin L. Gore’s album 'Counterfeit 2' and, recently, Superpitcher’s 'Happiness' and Quarks’ ‘Du entkommst mir nicht’. Very nice, though I have to admit that I like the Antonelli Electric remix better. Perhaps that’s because I don’t like Jovanka von Willsdorf’s voice and Antonelli Electric have kept the vocal samples at a minimum.
When Lawrence’s second album, 'The Absence of Blight', was issued last autumn, it appears that much consultation of dictionaries occured in regard to the word ‘blight’ and attempts were made by different reviewers to interpret the title and set it in relation to the music and Mr Kersten. Much interpretation was also undertaken of the artwork and this is, I think, a better key to the music. Ten bleak black and white photographs, seven depicting weeds struggling in desolate, hostile urban surroundings, three views of sunlit post acid-rain German forests and meadows. Weeds that have broken through cracks in the pavement, grow against the wall of what appears to be a junk-filled backyard, have taken over large concrete municipal flowerpots abundant in German cities, one of them on a rail pallet, a small tree at the dead end of a line of track. Blight is a disease of plants, among other meanings, and Mr Kersten apprenticed as a gardener prior to his studies at Lüneburg university.
Hamburg is Germany’s largest port and one of the largest in Europe, in direct competition with Rotterdam. From here the goods arrived by container are distributed, by truck and by rail, to destination all over the country and Europe. In the south of Hamburg, near industrial Harburg, there is a huge wasteland of tracks, acre upon acre of parallel tracks, illuminated by hundreds of sodium arc lights, whose orange glow lights up the night sky and is visible from miles away when one approches Hamburg on the A1 (Autobahn 1) from the south in the dark. It is photographs of this view, again in black and white, that constitute the artwork on Sten’s album, 'Leaving the Frantic', issued on 9 October.
Two connected panels on the front of the inlay show a seemingly endless freight train, each car loaded with one container of COSCO, the national Chinese shipping line, twenty of which grow smaller from right to left and recede from view. On the back of the inlay, five connected panels show the upper part of a number of the lights mentioned. The emotion I associate with all of these pictures, on both albums, is melancholy. And this is a very apt word to describe the emotional content of both Lawrence’s and Sten’s music.
As Lawrence, Mr Kersten produced House, as Sten minimalistic Techno. Lawrence has been described as music to wallow in your depression to, Sten as music to dance to. In an interview with Sami Khatib, published in the December 2003 issue of de:bug magazine (www.de-bug.de) Mr Kersten describes the difference thus:
‘Lawrence is my concrete artistic being. Sten is much more abstract, not devoid of emotion, but more a minimal Club-Techno project. I have separated the two, because it is a more relaxed way of working. Sten tracks are relatively quick work, while I work very long on Lawrence tracks. But sometimes I know only subsequently whether a current production is a Lawrence or a Sten track.’ Asked how he defines this, Mr Kersten replied: ‘That’s a very simple decision that I have to make then. Should people listen to it or dance to it? It would be ideal, of course, to dance while listening. ... Sten gives me the possibilty to simply ‘fire away’. I am, after all, not only the multilayered, melancholy Lawrence.’
This arbitrary division is far from exact (and probably can’t be exact): there are tracks on ‘The Absence of Blight’ that are eminently danceable, while a number of the tracks on ‘Leaving the Frantic’ are both melancholy and multilayered despite a 4/4 beat. Sten’s brillant ‘From a Spire’ is almost a continuation of Lawrence’s ‘Neighbourhood’, both of which tickle the hips and yet evoke, through simple organ chords, a sense of nostalgia and sadness. These organ chords appear on a number of tracks on ‘Leaving the Frantic’.
Four of the tracks on ‘Leaving the Frantic’ have been previously available as 12 inches on Dial, a fifth on Sender Records. The vinyl version of the album includes two bonus tracks not on the CD.
My favourites, apart from the two tracks mentioned, are Lawrence’s ‘Fifteen Minutes with You’ (a beautiful love song, in my view), Sten’s opener, ‘Back Four’, with the shift in the last third (others would have made two separate tracks out of this), ‘Eccentric’, ‘Are You A Doctor’ (which would be the question to ‘I Am Not A Doctor’, Moloko’s second album) and ‘Frost’, a track to drive to through Northern Germany’s monotonous flat landscape in winter- endless fields of earth frozen solid, solitary trees.
In Hamburg, there are sections of the lines where the underground trains travel overground, much like New York City’s famous Elevated. In one particular section, with the vast port on the left and the hypermodern architecture of one of Germany’s largest magazine publishing houses on the right, under a leaden sky, I thought that if I were to set these images to music, both Lawrence and Sten would be perfect.
Five Stars (both)
posted by Arta Buneta at 7:40 AM
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