LawnChair Generals - reclining groove

Seattle isn't a place widely associated with house music yet LawnChair Generals - Carlos Mendoza and Peter Christianson - have put the city on the map.

Mendoza maintains his hometown harbours more than its legacy of angst-ridden rock.

"There are quite a few people [in Seattle] making music, recording it, and it's had a very long history of underground and electronic music - guys like DJ Dan and [US superstar DJ] Donald Glaude are both from here - and there are a lot of us as far as underground house goes.

"We've been at it since 1992/1993, so right about when grunge ended, electronic music started coming up in this area - all along the West Coast, really. Grunge was just a particular brand of rock. It's still a rock town, there's still a lot of rock 'n' roll going on, but that's almost 14-years-old now, grunge, the death of grunge, so there's all kinds of music going on here - it's not just electronic and not just rock."

LawnChair Generals' hometown was in the spotlight in 2005 as host of the prestigious Red Bull Music Academy.
Today only Carlos resides in Seattle, with Peter relocating to San Francisco less than a year ago to attend graduate school at the nearby University of California (he's studying journalism, of all things).

LawnChair Generals, who're embarking on their third Australian tour, have been issuing music steadily since 2001 when they presented The Great Escape EP, followed by U Dirty, home to the DJ favourite One Thing. They subsequently unleashed The Truth, giving a welcome boost to Dizzy's Lowdown Recordings. The duo are currently plugging Lost And Found, a double-pack of remixes, on their eponymous label.

The challenge for the pair now is to collaborate long distance. Peter acknowledges the difficulty.

"We've been experimenting with different methods, including Carlos travelling down here and me travelling back up there so we can work together. Fairly recently we've been able to get a system that's just about working where we can transfer projects back and forth over the Internet."

The two have concentrated on developing individual studio set-ups that mirror each other. They have clear ideas as to where they're heading musically. While Peter accepts the pervasiveness of electro (although it doesn't have the same hold in the US as here), LawnChair Generals have ushered in a "traditional house" ethos.

"I'm rather bored with instrumental tracks that are unmemorable," Carlos concurs. "It's definitely a struggle these days 'cause it's very easy to make instrumental beats and music without melody, music without harmony - it's a lot easier to do that given the software and how inexpensive computers are. Anyone can get the tools.

"I guess the thing that we always try to do is just remember music and remember that that is what people remember when they leave a club - they remember the music and they remember the songs and they remember melodies. That's what we wanna hear, that's what we like, and that's what we wanna hear when we go out to hear another DJ play.

"I think that maybe that was what was different when we started - that's something that we felt we had to carry."
To this end LawnChair Generals are introducing song structures and recording with vocalists and actually departing from a strict house tempo.

LawnChair Generals are nostalgic, too, for the simplicity of early US dance and fancy crafting music with what Carlos calls "a raw classic techno and house kinda feel." Sums up Peter, "We're challenging ourselves to write better music." That's something that even Kurt Cobain would dig.


WHO: LawnChair Generals
WHAT: Play Monkey Tennis 4th Birthday
WHERE: Candy’s Apartment
WHEN: Saturday 13 May
MORE: www.clubmonkeytennis.com