Dance music, by definition, is communal—except when it's not. The German electronic musician Lawrence, aka Peter Kersten, makes house music that's as much about getting lost in one's head as being enfolded by the crowd. And while Kersten rarely strays too far from dancefloor-oriented forms, his work has spent the past several years getting steadily dreamier.
Kersten is a key figure in German house and techno, having co-founded Hamburg's Dial label in 2000 and then, in 2006, the deeper-diving Smallville. Early Dial pursued a streamlined take on house music that, combined with the whittled-down sounds of early-'00s digital production, led to its characterization, not always accurately, as a minimalist enterprise. But the label never relinquished its fondness for the skippy rhythms and soulful undercurrent of Chicago house, and it went in hard for a strain of windswept romanticism that was easily apparent in both the label's sleeves and its titles. (From Lawrence's own catalog, just consider bittersweet songs like "Happy Sometimes," "The Night Will Last Forever," and the Smiths-referencing "Fifteen Minutes With You.") Smallville, meanwhile, has represented a distillation of those tendencies, resulting in a hyper-classicist style of house, heavy on all the analog signatures of pioneers like Larry Heard, that's also wistfully misty-eyed. Throughout, Lawrence's recordings—including his albums for Japan's Mule Musiq label, of which Yoyogi Park is the third—have served as a kind of ur-text for the Smallville aesthetic.
His ambient inclinations peaked with 2014's A Day in the Life, a collection of songs that took all his typical hallmarks—the shimmer, the swirl, the open-ended tones—and muted all the drums. The result, delicate and ephemeral, was something like the logical conclusion of his most sensitive tendencies: music for Sunday-morning snuggling, walks in the garden, and gentle comedowns, with the merest memory of the dancefloor traced in the shadow of a pulse. Yoyogi Park starts where A Day in the Life left off. It's suffused in hazy synthesizers, sparkling arpeggios, and melodic lines that twist like green tendrils. But in places Yoyogi Park also marks Lawrence's wholehearted return to the dancefloor. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the three songs that have been reprised—upcycled, really—from the previous album, doubled in length and given a whole new rhythmic underpinning. Where the original version of "Nowhere Is a Place" drifted like a kelp forest, the new one leaps purposefully into motion, driven by tightly wound hi-hats and a walking bassline that's unusually fleet of foot. Flickering chords lend additional color and movement, and the result sounds a little like an updated version of Ricardo Villalobos' great "808 the Bassqueen," but even more full-bodied, if you can believe it. This is not an album for sitting still: "Marble Star" fleshes out its ultra-low lows and ultra-dreamy highs with rugged, rolling breakbeats, and "Blue Mountain" rides white-capped waves of synths and drums that bob like flotsam borne aloft on the tide.
One of Kersten's favorite tricks is to juggle soft and hard textures until you're not sure which is which. "Tensui" starts off with knife-edged hi-hats and tough wooden thumps, but it's soon suffused in drowsy pads and bucolic flutes. It would be easy to imagine the same elements remade for A Day in the Life's beatless reveries; the fact that he manages to marry such diffuse sounds to a rhythm track so overwhelmingly physical—this isn't bass you simply feel; you savor it, with your whole body—only makes the track more remarkable. Nothing on Yoyogi Park is original, exactly; Lawrence has been making music like this for most of his career, and his peers on Dial and Smallville have spun the same material in similar ways. Still, no one else is making this music quite so well. And as far as Lawrence's catalog goes, this is his fullest realization yet of interior and exterior—of thought and movement, of daydream and dance. The line separating Saturday night and Sunday morning is no thicker than a second hand; Yoyogi Park invites you to clear out a space inside that sliver of time, and to luxuriate in it.
