Laurence Guy - Making Music is Bad for Your Self Esteem

February 28, 2019 - Studio Barnhus

Musicians today have so much available to them in instrumental and stylistic options. Thanks to the internet, the Information Age, sophisticated synthesizers and digital production software, the eclectics never had it so good. Inspiration floats through the air like mold spores looking for a brain to infest.

And Laurence Guy is infested with the mood. Making Music Is Bad For Your Self Esteem is his latest release on Stockholm’s Studio Barnhus. As I meandered through the six tracks laid out on this EP, I started thinking about how much can be said in fewer than five notes. Is this a musical body of work or an exploration of the limits of musical language? 

I don’t mean Guy is pushing the boundaries further outward. Instead, he’s tenderly caressing that boundary edge and then looking at it with a magnifying glass. A new perspective. A rumination on something fluid we perceive to be concrete—the musician’s suggestion to the listener’s assumptions. 

Every song on what I’ll call MMIBFYSE for short has a foundational melodic action that is only a few notes long. In ‘Wildlife’ and ‘Missing In Reaction,’ that action is only two notes in a progression. It sounds like Guy sat down at a keyboard one day and recorded a collection of very short riffs that became the basis for this entire body of work. They are repeated over and over again, and the songs bloom out of them like springtime. These small lyrical clauses are equivalent to simple syntax in the English language. And Guy explores them like a Marcel Proust novel written only with sentences built from the sentence “I sat.” The concept here is that there is great complexity to the simplest truths. What happens when a few notes are played in progression but not allowed to resolve? Does the listener fill in the blanks with an anticipated emotional response? I do. 

Guy pairs his introspective compositional approach with a wild and playful percussive energy, which is what gives the songs a feeling of spontaneity I find very attractive. He expresses the joy of making sound for the hell of it. The textures in these songs are fearlessly handcrafted, and that leads to moments of astonishing complexity. The jazz rhythm on my favorite track, ‘Are You Fine?’ is a notable example. It undulates in and out of unbridled syncopation which pairs beautifully with the glittering trills of the melodic riff. When emphasized by the drums, the melody bursts with potential like an unanswered question hanging in the air or birdsong after a rainstorm. Plus, there is so much expansive space built into the track that the experience becomes completely immersive. 

Another notable highlight on the EP is that nine-minute-long ‘My Brain Is A Scrambled Egg.’ The glossy, camera-ready synths in the beginning are contrasted sharply with theremin sounds. They push and pull throughout the song like a call and response. It creates the illusion of a thin narrative, like two ballet dancers figuring out how to occupy space on the same stage. I guess it’s the right and left halves of Guy’s brain on the stage together. Picture it. A sundial and a candle. A keyboard and a brush dripping in paint. A calculator and a bottle of alcohol. A performance artist with a library. Who knows. 

Finally, I love the grand finish on the last track ‘I Have The Feeling I’ve Been Here Before.’ The song comes on like sunshine on bare buttocks. Then the melody just unravels into nothing. Let me melt away into nothing. All the struggles of mankind are pointless. 

Guy, thank you. This little EP got me through a really tough week. ☔