COURTESY OF CHRISTOPHER-LAWRENCE.COM
Christopher Lawrence has become one of the world's best deejays.
Trance dance
An L.A. deejay brings
grand stylings to the isles
Shortly after touching down in the U.K. for a set of tour dates in the summer of 2000, deejay Christopher Lawrence came face to face with true celebrity. And, he says, it looked unnervingly familiar.
"I was tired after an all-night flight, I got off the plane and I was going past a newsstand in the airport, and there was my face in the window on the cover of Wax magazine," he recalls. It was the second time in the span of a month that he'd been the subject of a magazine cover story, and in the community of deejaying, that amounts to world-class status. "That's one of those things where you go 'Damn, things are going pretty well.' "
Three years removed from that revelation, Lawrence's reputation as one of the world's most sought-after deejays has only increased, allowing the turntable wizard to traverse the globe many times over. This weekend, he will give his third performance in Hawaii in as many years. Last week it was Montreal. The week before, he'd played Birmingham, England and Thessaloniki, Greece, and dates in Medellin, Colombia, and Lima, Peru, are on the horizon.
There may not be a single magical formula to achieving elite status on the international deejay circuit, says Lawrence, but there are several pointers that would greatly aid deejays in preparing for their big break. "It's a combination of luck, a lot of hard work and being ready when the opportunities arise," he states. "Beyond that, it's consistency. Once people recognize you or they come to your events or listen to your (albums), you have to be good every time. People can easily spend $50 on a night out and they want to know they can rely on a consistent deejay."
THAT CONSISTENCY was cultivated over years of disc spinning and crowd manning in the club scenes of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Raised 45 minutes north of San Francisco in the suburban desert of Santa Rosa, Lawrence learned his craft in the nightclubs of the city by the bay, where he was introduced to a wide array of musical styles and subcultures. When the acid house phenomenon hit in the late 1980s and early '90s, the aspiring deejay found a sound he could really get into.
Soon, Lawrence, armed with just a transmitter and an antenna, began his own electronic-based pirate radio station called Universal Radio, which was heard across San Francisco every Sunday evening. "We'd record the show early in the day, go up on a mountain and broadcast all over the city. We'd have the equipment hooked up to a boom box and I just played tapes off it. We'd have someone on either side of the mountain with two-way radios and if the cops came, we'd have to pull it down really quick and run."
As rave culture flourished across the U.S. during that decade, regionalisms began to develop. While cosmopolitan San Francisco seemed to gravitate toward a soulful, sophisticated house sound, Los Angeles, with its massive underground warehouse parties took to the grand, anthemic stylings of trance. It became apparent to Lawrence that if he intended to make trance his sound, L.A. was the place to be.
"To me, trance always offered the most," he says. "It offers something for the mind, body and soul. A lot of the basslines and rhythms are taken from house music and techno, but beyond that, it's got its own elements you don't find in any other music. For me, there's no better music for the dance floor."
Lawrence now records for dance labels Moonshine and System in the U.S. and Hook in the U.K., in a surprisingly trouble-free arrangement. "I'm more like a free agent," he says with a laugh. "Which I like because I get along with all three labels. Those labels get along with each other as well because they realize it's in each other's beat interest to work together. The bigger my profile is, the better it is for the labels and the harder I work for each label, the harder they're going to work for me."
His latest effort, entitled "Exposure IV: Mixed By Christopher Lawrence" is closer to a live performance than any disc he's produced in his career. "For me, it's the best CD I've ever done because it best captures my live sound, which is very hard to do on a CD," he reveals of the album, a fiery collection of churning futuristic rhythms and hopped-up dance tracks selected by the trance master himself. "I've just got to play it when it comes from the soul."
'JUICY'
Featuring Christopher Lawrence
Where: Maze, Waikiki Trade Center, 2nd floor, 2255 Kuhio Ave.
When: 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. tomorrow
Admission: $10 cover, 18 and over
Call: 921-5800
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