David Lawrie

English Composer and Producer living in California who works both as a solo artist and with others, on both sides of the Atlantic. I have always been drawn towards hardcore composition styles - particularly that of minimalism, music concrete and electroacoustic (amongst others) - due to the precision of required skills and the expanse of compositional freedom that is afforded to them. Where there is this type of freedom, however, a huge limitation is imposed in that these hardcore styles are elitist - reserved for the exclusive audiences of academics and art critics - and are destined to end up in museum archives and lecture theatres, or worse still, simply vanish into obscurity. Only a handful of hardcore composers achieve a status of wider public appreciation, and even then, a majority of the appreciation seems to be from hearsay and reputation, rather than from actual listening. On the other hand, the accessibility of popular music fascinates me. Where the aforementioned styles are slow moving in an ocean with no borders or boundaries, popular music is in a swimming pool full of children, splashing. The transient waves of what is good and what is bad (and how quickly those labels can change) is exciting to me. Yes - there do seem to be many restrictions when creating pop, but what really draws me towards it is finding out what makes a piece of popular music stand the test of time. I try to marry the accessibility of popular music songwriting with composition and production techniques from other (non)disciplines. I believe in equal opportunities music. As far as I'm concerned, music should have the capacity to be appreciated on different scales by listeners with different aesthetic criteria. As much as I enjoy discussions with academics, musicians and music producers, the single most endearing compliment is from someone who simply says "I like that," especially if they are not able to specify why, because music is a language, and what use is a language if no one understands it?