This Disco Rocks
Steve Lawler's new mix-CD captures tribal house's dark side
Maybe he doesn't know it, but Steve Lawler is disco's avenger. As a top-tier club DJ and producer, he's been at the helm of cutting-edge "tribal house," the soundtrack for a modern era of diverse dance-floor hedonism that does disco one better by adding digital technology to the mix of drugs, dancing, and deviance. With his latest mix-CD, Lights Out 2, Lawler lets you in on a sleazy, steamy, sexed-up club that recalls the tongue-swapping, bump-snorting ways of Studio 54 as much as it celebrates the futuristic bacchanalia of modern-day Ibiza, Spain. The isle's famed Terrace at club Space is where the British jock has held sway (they call him the "King of Space") for several summers straight.
In Lights Out 2, released last week, Lawler bridges disco's abandon with house music's hand-raising soul and the next wave of dirty, digital house. Since the turn of the millennium, Lawler has risen from his native town near Birmingham, England, to join the DJs' DJs club that includes Deep Dish, Danny Howells, and New York legend Danny Tenaglia, to whom he is frequently compared.
"I've been buying Danny Tenaglia's records since I was 19," says the 30-year-old. "The first time I ever DJ'd with him was a personal achievement for me. To be compared to him was quite a compliment. But we both play very different records most of the time."
Lawler started listening to house in the late '80s. "At my whole school, there was only one other person who listened to the same kind of music," he says. "I was a bit of a geek. Everyone was like, 'What's that weird music?' And now it turns out to be the biggest musical movement to happen in the last 20 years." Soon he was working at the legendary Global Grooves record shop in Birmingham and hosting early one-offs in a tunnel beneath a British highway near his hometown. By the mid-'90s, he was spinning with the best of them in Ibiza, and in 1997 he started a residency at premier Liverpool super-club Cream. His productions, such as the Latin-esque "Adante" for John Digweed's Bedrock label, have certainly been well-received, but Lawler remains better known for his party-starting mix-CDs and live sets. He is the master of the so-called "dark drums" sound, perhaps best represented during his performances at Space's Terrace.
"It's just an amazing gig," Lawler says. "People get undressed rather than dressed up. You see girls wearing bikinis and expensive sunglasses bigger than their heads. It's an older, sexy crowd. Everybody just goes off."
Lights Out 2 is a party with a message. While it rocks out to percussive bliss and electro synths, it doesn't forget dance music's outcast past. On Presser's chugging, acidic "2 Black 2 Gay," a sample has a man saying "too black and too gay for middle America." Then Lawler takes the liberty of placing another sample over the song's end: "This is now officially the world's largest anti-disco rally," a man says to cheers at what sounds like the 1979 anti-disco riots at Chicago's Comiskey Park. "Disco sucks, disco sucks, disco sucks," chant the man and his flock.
Then, on Steffano Noto Presents Faith Sounds' "London Nights," Lawler gets creative with other people's music again and adds the a cappella from Eddie Amador's legendary anthem "House Music": "Not everyone understands house music/It's a spiritual thing, a body thing, a soul thing." Indeed. Throughout the two-disc mix, Lawler gives listeners more than just a linear romp through his vinyl collection. It's a multimedia experience with samples, loops, and edits - a spiritual thing.
"A lot of DJs nowadays use computer packages and engineers," he says. "There's a way I mix that, as you bring a track up, you might snap the bass in, and you can only do that on a live mix. I must have mixed this running order of records 40 times before I got it right. In the computer I might add a cappellas and loops to make it more interesting."
He even sprinkles in some tracks with loathed '80s sounds in a post-disco spirit. "My feeling about the '80s revival is, it was shit in the first place," Lawler says. "In every movement in music, you should develop something new. But some of the music uses some of those '80s elements, but is still a chunky record. The '80s were big on organ sounds. Some of the tracks use those elements in a more dirty underground way, and that excites me. It's pumping and dirty. That's new."Published: 11/13/2003
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