timlawrence.info

Here are some of the articles I've written. (I'm still working on this page...)

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 geographical space that was not more than twenty-by-twenty square blocks,” notes Marvin J. Taylor, editor of The Downtown Book...

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 what will follow when I write the history of 1980s US dance culture (something I will turn to when I have finished the biography of Arthur Russell). Download the PDF for the magazine version, including photos. The PDF contains an error: "was simply random" should read "wasn't simply random".

"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...