All about this artist
Biography:
Born Peter M. Kersten, Germany. Former gardener Kersten has cited "photographing dead trees and plants" as an interest (alongside contemporary classical music and German crime series Tatort), and it is easy to imagine the DJ/producer's atmospheric mixture of house, deep ambient and minimal techno sound-tracking time-lapse footage of wilting flowers and the falling of leaves: this "church organist who hated church' makes music for the midpoint between the sweaty throbbing dance-floor and the decaying autumnal garden.
As if to emphasise such an aesthetic, Kersten packaged his second album (2003"s The Absence Of Blight) in resolutely grey images of dead plants while on the 2005 follow-up The Night Will Last Forever, he even looked to horticultural themes for the titles of two tracks, "The Lawn" and "Crippled Trees".
The sleeve image to Lawrence's third album (and Novamute Records debut) was actually of a crowd of people rather than shrubbery, but the pallid, monochromatic picture, sapped of definition and bleached of intensity, seemed apposite to Lawrence's more melancholic creations ("Lost Images", "Leave Me Tomorrow", "A Quiet Day") and to the eerie, disembodied voices that seeped through the title track's house grooves.
"The Night Will Last Forever" is perhaps the perfect hybrid of Kersten's seemingly antithetical pre-occupations, simultaneously a dance-floor come on and a slightly spooky evocation of an unkempt garden. Kersten is resident DJ at The Golden Pudel and Click in his native Hamburg.
He also records under a variety of different monikers, including Sten (minimal techno), Lloyd (abstract hip-hop) and Bordeaux (ambient). He has notably had his music remixed by Carsten Jost (with whom he runs Dial), Serafin, John Tejada and Usine and has, in turn, remodelled tracks by Martin Gore, Goldfrapp, Turner and Superpitcher.
