Brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence, better known as ‘Disclosure’, have been causing a stir with their youthful take on Dub/2-step. Their tight knit rhythms and progressive vocal samples have caught the attention of those looking for a new evolution of garage-inspired floor fillers. Their debut single ‘Offline Dexterity’ b/w ‘Streetlight Chronicle’ is out on Moshi Moshi singles club on September 6th. Oh, and did I mention that they have a combined age of just 35?
So tell us about yourselves? All we know is you’re two young talented brothers. How did Disclosure come about?
Well, we are Howard, 19 and Guy, 16. We have both written songs individually and together all of our lives but we only decided to start making the kind of songs we make today around 2009 when we began to hear music from people like Burial who brought an element of soundscape to the 2 step sound.
You’ve got a single coming out on Moshi Moshi singles club soon right?
The two tracks coming out on Moshi soon are the first tracks we decided to actually put a name on and were made in our living room on a Macbook. That’s all we had back then!
Your family has a musical background, tell us about music in the Lawrence household.
Both of our parents have played in and are still in functional bands. Our dad was in a fairly successful rock band once. They were briefly signed to CBS and toured for sometime. They are the reasons why we started playing music from as young as 4 years old. I (Guy) started playing the drums before I can remember and I picked up guitar from about the age of 10. Howard began playing bass also at 10 and we both try and play piano!
I hear hints of Burial and Joy Orbison in your music, where do you think you fit in the UK music scene?
I think we would both agree that Burial was our entry point into the whole 2-step scene, which led us to dubstep and so on. We like to think that our music could be a way of bringing elements of jazzy ambient harmony and melody into the 2step/dubstep scene, where the sub bass becomes more obsolete and the chords and samples take more of a lead role.
And where else do you draw your influences?
We were brought up listening to a huge variety of music. Our dad used to play us endless prog-rock like Genesis and Pink Floyd. I think this may have been the catalyst for our interest in creating interesting textures and soundscapes in our music now. We both listened to a lot of 90’s hip-hop: Jedi Mind Tricks, Gang Star and Nujabes to name a few.
It’s great to be living around the south suburbs of London where all this exciting new music like dubstep is being produced. It’s nice to feel like our music has a home here. We both study/studied music at school and college so we both take pleasure in good song writing, lush chords and beautiful melody, such as in jazz and people like John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Roy Ayers being the main influences. We are both still really excited about the music coming form new bands today such as Wild Beasts, Everything Everything and Foals.
Do you plan to release an album at any point?
Absolutely. It seems mad to be thinking about it now, but everything up until now has happened so quickly! We can’t wait to see where the coming years take us.
When writing and recording the music, who handles what?
Howard has yet to do his music production course, which I finished last year so I do all the mixing at this point, based upon both of our ideas and input. I build of drums and percussion, being a drummer… Howard’s input is more one of melody, cutting up samples and arguing with me about what is good and shit. His ability to build chords and melodies really annoys me for his age!
Will you be doing any live shows anytime soon?
We are locked in the studio at the moment working on originals and a few remixes, so we’re taking a break from the live show at the moment, but keep an eye out as after the release we want to be playing loads!
http://www.myspace.com/disclosureuk
Words by Julian Von Nehammer
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.