Laurence Guy - Your Good Time Will Come

September 3, 2020 - Shall Not Fade

Here’s an anecdote in the spirit of Halloween. I recently learned about dancing mania, a social phenomenon that occurred in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. Groups of people, sometimes thousands at a time, would dance together through town and across the pastoral landscape. The desire to dance was highly contagious like a virus—I glance sideways to nobody and cough into my elbow crease—but historians and disease experts haven’t been able to attribute patterns in the accounts of the behavior to a specific organic cause or disease vector. People would dance together until they collapsed, and it appears to have been a completely psychogenic illness.  

Why did they do it? Why did they drop everything and dance themselves unconscious? What were the circumstances that drove them? What was missing? What was it that dancing together attempted to equalize? 

UK-based genuine human house music magician Laurence Guy has dropped a new EP titled Your Good Times Will Come on Shall Not Fade. True to his form, it’s a highly detailed, smartly dressed mystery, wearing a close-lipped smile after asking a series of facetiously ambiguous questions back at me. As the EP’s title suggests, the four-song progression comes off as an act of non-judgemental comforting, of reassurance. But this music won’t let you indulge in your sorrow. Guy is a nihilistic healer, and he seems to ask, “so what?” in response to all the pains that bubble up in your mind, one at a time, when listening. Eventually, there are no more pains left, and your mind becomes a flat can of soda, tasty without prickle, easy to drink. All that remains is a good mood. Maybe that’s why they danced. 

The EP kicks off with its namesake track, a promise which begins as a disco record that skips on the turntable in perfect time, a mechanical act of collage, of recontextualization and rebirth. It then begins to move around in space, at times close and at times muffled, as though Guy is walking with that record player in his hands and you are following him. Sometimes foliage, furniture, and architecture block the sound waves, and you move a little faster so you don’t lose him and the sweet music he carries. The sound leads you somewhere new, like a conga line through a hot labyrinthian dream mansion filled with plants. When you catch up to Guy, the song opens up acoustically for you to groove without worry that the groove will disappear. Well, at least for a moment until he starts to move again. Visions of the Pied Piper of Hamelin come to mind (but the version of lore where he leads us children to a beautiful land, not the one where he drowns us in the river). Guy’s going to make it better. Maybe that’s why they followed.

After the conga line warms the crowd up to the hike ahead, ‘Experience Health’ swoops in to release a refreshing dose of menthol. The vocal-like sample Guy uses to establish the beat and as an undercurrent reminds me of someone saying, “Oh, ok!” when they are genuinely impressed by something I’ve said. Even though it’s distorted by Guy’s playful production as a curator of strange sounds, the sample captures the way the voice of someone in polite conversation expresses wonder without losing the structure of words, how it lifts up skyward like a reverse yoyo. What better way to get us to experience health than to create a song that’s repeatedly amazed by us. We become hypnotized by the good feelings, then some really pretty melodic lines start to glide into the picture and envelop us like a blanket of positive calm, heralding an angelic sample of a woman’s voice from some sort of new age spiritual healing method tapes. The overall effect is that of entering a very unique planetarium, surrounded by the sublime of simulated expanse. If we were unsure about Guy’s intentions with us before, they become overt on this track. He’s our spirit guide. 

Soft piano and a vocal sample are established early as the prominent guiding forces on ‘The Spirit,’ but I think this third song on the EP was crafted specifically to heighten the moments when its bass drops. The way the bass comes in the first time is so smooth yet high contrast, yummy like sex on a boat instead of the beach (no sand, no problems). Guy throws the piano under the water momentarily so we can focus on how the sunlight dances across the waves as we rock in time with them. He floats it back up to the surface, then sinks it back down again. It’s a song of up and down, of gentle melody and dance groove, of holding your breath and feeling your heartbeat, of seeing objects and their after images, of the light spectrum and contrasting colors. It ends as softly as it began, with one final groove preceded by a fadeout, so we clearly know the song is coming to an end. Guy is the master of the soft landing. He knows that letting us down easy will keep us from panicking. Maybe that’s why we trust him. 

All good things must come to an end, and Your Good Times Will Come ends with a lullaby of levity in ‘Dreamer.’ The bubbly synths he uses as the grounding texture sound a bit like a guinea pig talking, or a zipper zipping up and down over and over again. The beat itself is sandy, and it is thick enough to absorb the shock of existential dread. A soft voice is saying “tuh” and “kuh” over and over again while chimes trill about in the background, like your brain is ruminating on the objects of spoken sound as you fall asleep, stripping words of their meaning so you can finally relax. Maybe now we’ve arrived. 

Laurence Guy is a holistic musician, a mood engineer and an auditory collector. He thinks about sound in three dimensions because he’s aware that he’s building music for our experience as 3-D beings in our 3-D world. His goal as a maker is to fill the air around us and the dense matter inside us with good musical vibrations to shake off our complacence and despair. He is well aware of the power he wields. In my present state, I can’t afford to trust artists with this aspiration without questioning them. Some make you feel good then rip that off and leave you bleeding afterward. (This approach has merit in times of selective abundance of course, but right now, we’re all hemorrhaging a collective river without art’s help.) That said, I have yet to come across a reason not to trust Laurence Guy. He treats me gently and always succeeds to make me smile, even on my worst days. His music leads me to a headspace that’s pleasant. He’s a great therapist, and Your Good Times Will Come is cheaper than therapy. I would follow him anywhere, dancing until I dropped out of sweet sweet exhaustion. ☔