On a particular early summer day, Damian Lazarus is trying to borrow a friend’s car to take the driving test for his California license. He’s been living in LA for less than a year but his insurance company has cut him off until he sorts out a US license. “Finding someone who has a properly insured car with no cracked mirrors isn’t easy in this town.”
Living east of Hollywood with his cat and girlfriend, Lazarus has a radically different life now than he did just a few years ago. His move to LA was partly in effort to “isolate himself” just a little from the scene and from the city. “I’m living on the top of a very big hill away from the hustle and bustle.” The move for the magazine editor-turned DJ/label head from the gray of the UK for the California sun coincides with the release of his stunning artist album, Smoke the Monster Out. Lazarus is clear, however, that this album was not part of a calculated plan.
“I just started to get these ideas for some tracks and for some songs without actually having an idea for an album,” he explains of its origins. “I put this book together for notes and queries with no endgame in sight. After a while I started to look through it and started to create some melodic ideas for what I had written down.”
Just as it makes sense that the former journalist to keep a notebook, it makes sense for a DJ to make a mix CD. “I started to compile a CD like an old school mix tape. I was thinking, if I was to make my own music, what would the ideal flow be, what would the song structures and sounds be? I could go into the studio and say I’ve got this idea for a song, here’s some of the lyrics, and here’s a couple of tracks we could listen to for a basis of inspiration.”
This was the birth of his digital mixtape series, Lazpod, which for nearly two years has showcased some of Damian’s originals as well as his top picks – from St. Vincent to Radiohead, Hot Chip to Jamie Lidell – things you wouldn’t necessarily hear if you saw him spin in a club, and that was the point. “It made people a little bit more prepared for who I am as an artist.”
Which to a certain extent, is true. Smoke the Monster Out is an austere, personal yet playful collection of songs where Lazarus calls upon the sounds of the post-minimal techno scene he is a part of, as well as the varied work of artists he admires to make something wholly his own.
The album’s first single, “Neverending,” features Lazarus singing – a first for him – and comes with a kinda fancy video (there’s choreography and everything!) But it’s the second track on the album, “Moment,” that is definitively awesome.
“I was coming from a gig in a car on the autobahn in Germany,” says Lazarus of how he wrote the song. “I was thinking about how Kraftwerk were inspired to write there, but I was a bit – how do you say – dizzy from the party the night before. I had lots of thoughts running around and I just started writing these words. As they were coming out and I was scratching things out and replacing things, a melody started rolling around in my head. I had the initial hook but I couldn’t record it then, so I had to write it out as ‘la la la dee dee dee.’ I knew I wanted it to be a little bit epic. I wanted it to be a combination of acoustic and analog sounding stuff fused with digitized music.”
The song starts with Lazarus sweetly singing accompanied by a piano. Then a beat drops and eventually the eerily sanguine (and slightly pitched upward) voices of Taxi Taxi!, a Swedish duo of teen twin sisters, comes in to complete what could be the weirdest thing ever but instead is just beautiful.
Lazarus found Taxi Taxi! through a former colleague who had heard about them from Björk. The girls were a mere 17 at the time. “I had to contact their parents and tell them ‘I’m a really safe bloke, you have nothing to worry about!’ They trusted me – foolish people,” he jokes. “I introduced these girls to this dark evil world of techno.”
As for the song’s meaning, Lazarus prefers to remain mum. “I want to keep things open for people. They’re very personal to me, but I like to make them in a way where they’re open [for interpretation].”
But that’s not to say he’s trying to hide behind his work. This album, in fact, is a way for Damian to connect more to his fans.
“As a DJ you put yourself out there but people only get to know your character through the music you play. I thought, there’s quite a bit more of me that I wanted to hint at as way for people to maybe understand a little bit more about what I do and why I do it. I’m out there in the public eye anyway, I may as well try and get people a little bit closer to who I am. I’ve seen too much in the music industry where people hide behind certain facades. I want everything I do to be a bit more of an open book.”
Here’s to Smoke the Monster Out as your summer reading.
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