timlawrence.info

Here's a selection of some of the articles (media and academic) I've written.

Icons: Arthur Russell (Attitude)

A composer and multi-instrumentalist who lived and worked in New York during the creative peak of the downtown era, Russell was a quirky character who appeared to live at a tangent to his times. While his peers prepared for Armageddon by dressing in ripped black leather as they explored the outer limits of noise, Russell wore check shirts and made music that was esoteric yet anthemic in order to

Lucky Cloud Sound System (i-D)

Lucky Cloud Sound System is rooted in the ethos of the house party, the social potential of audiophile equipment, and the willingness of David Mancuso to travel to London to put on parties four times a year. The first of those parties was held in the upstairs attic of the Light Bar, a converted power station located in the southeast corner of Shoreditch, in June 2003. A little under three years later, Lucky Cloud

Who's Not Who in the Downtown Crowd (Or: Don't Forget About Me) (Yeti)

It's becoming commonplace to note that New York City in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s was a place of remarkable musical innovation across a range of sounds. During this period, hip hop evolved in the boroughs and then made inroads into the city; punk, new wave and no wave transformed the aesthetics and culture of rock; the jazz loft scene that unfolded in venues such as Ali's Alley consolidated the sound of free jazz; the minimalist music/new music of La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who were also based in the city, mounted a concerted

Disco Madness: Walter Gibbons and the Legacy of Turntablism and Remixology (Journal of Popular Music Studies, 20, 3, 2008)

This story begins with a skinny white DJ mixing between the breaks of obscure Motown records with the ambidextrous intensity of an octopus on speed. It closes with the same man, debilitated and virtually blind, fumbling for gospel records as he spins up eternal hope in a fading dusk. In between Walter Gibbons worked as a cutting-edge discotheque DJ and remixer who, thanks to his pioneering reel-to-reel edits

Arthur Russell and Rhizomatic Musicianship (Liminalities)

During the 1970s and early 1980s, a diverse group of artists, musicians, sculptors, video filmmakers and writers congregated in downtown New York and forged a radical creative network. Distinguished by its level of interactivity, the network discarded established practices in order to generate new, often-interdisciplinary forms of art that melded aesthetics and community. “All these artists were living and working in an urban...

David Mancuso and the Loft (Placed, 2007)

The following article and interview appears in Placed, an new Berlin-based magazine. Conducted in London on the eve of  Lucky Cloud Sound System's spring party, the interview turned out to be every bit as engaging as my first interview with David, which was conducted in the East Village in 1997 and inspired Love Saves the Day. The London interview provides new insights into the 1970s and also offers a taster for

"I Want to See All My Friends At Once": Arthur Russell and the Queering of Gay Disco (Journal of Popular Music Studies, 18, 2, 2006)

Disco, it is commonly understood, drummed its drums and twirled its twirls across an explicit gay-straight divide. In the beginning, the story goes, disco was gay: Gay dancers went to gay clubs, celebrated their newly liberated status by dancing with other men, and discovered a vicarious voice in the form of disco's soul and gospel-oriented divas. Received wisdom has it that straights, having played no part in this embryonic moment, co-opted the culture after they...

In Defence of Disco (Again) (New Formations, Summer 2006)

"Disco" is the overburdened name given to the culture that includes the spaces (discotheques) that were organised around the playback of recorded music by a DJ (disc jockey); the social practice of individual freeform dancing that was established within this context; and the music genre that crystallised within this social setting between 1970 and 1979. Although disco has rarely been taken seriously, its impact was ⎯ and remains ⎯ far-reaching. In the 1970s, some fifteen...

Disco: Liberation of the Body

In the popular imagination, disco conjures up images of Studio 54, the celebrated New York 1970s nightclub, where hoards of would-be dancers queued up on a nightly basis, waving their arms frantically in an attempt to catch the eye of the venue's doorman, as if they were at an auction bidding for their own lives. Disco also triggers thoughts of John Travolta, the star of

King of Clubs (Village Voice, May 2004)

The party space, with its huge mirror ball and DNA strands of multicolored balloons, combines Alice in Wonderland   with astrophysics. "City, Country, City" percolates through five stacks of Klipschorn speakers and sounds so live that, if you close your eyes, War could be playing in the same room. As the percussive tempo builds, dancers regress, screaming and whooping as they execute spinning-top turns and syncopated jazz flicks...