The DUSK Issue: Logan Lamers
WORDS & PHOTOS BY AIDEEN GABBAI
Logan Lamers wants people to tune into the world. At a bakery in Beaver Dam, he told me about the process of making his track “Window,” where he fixed a microphone outside of his window and started playing along with the noise outside, calibrating his music with the rhythm of the street. He then pointed out the humming of the fridge that we’re sitting next to and the clinking of coffee mugs as parts of the everyday musicality that he tries to tap into. “That silence, that space connects you with where you are and what you're hearing and [it’s] like tuning your brain to lock into those sounds,” he explained.
Lamers is a musician from Oshkosh, WI, who makes sparse and impactful ambient tracks. “I've always found that I gravitated toward well placed, sometimes simple, sometimes spaced out music.”
He got his start playing cello, and his love for music blossomed when he discovered emo and rock music as a teenager. He currently plays for the Oshkosh-based rock band The Present Age, whose sound is starkly different from his solo work. When I asked him how he went from that to ambient, he replied, “You know, it's funny, I'm not on Twitter anymore, but there is a tweet that I remember from a few years ago. Somebody made a joke that there's this social pipeline of indie rock people making Aphex Twin, Eurorack synth music.”
For many people, music is about escapism, about transporting the listener somewhere outside of their world entirely. The lyrics pull you in, with layers of guitars and drum beats accompanying the story of a lost love or a hard day. But Lamers wants to make the listener pay attention to the quotidian and overlooked sounds of the world around them. “I don't wanna use the term meditate, but like [for them] to have a moment of slowing down, and just taking time.”
The title of his album, Simple Linear Iterative Clustering, comes from a computer program which distills photos into megapixels and highlights the most important parts of the frame. “All of these songs are one simple idea, one simple moment,” he said. He’s inspired by the work of Hiroshi Yoshimura, specifically his 1982 album Music for Nine Postcards, where ambient turns into “environment music”. He admitted that he doesn’t think of his album as a true album, because he made each of the tracks as singles, without a larger collective direction in mind, but that process exemplifies the title in my opinion. Each song on the cover has its own collection of pixels, and when assembled together, they create a new image, just like his music. It assembles these different parts of the world he inhabits, and crafts new ideas through the landscapes of the music, pulling out the most striking and musical elements and fusing them with the sounds of a MIDI controller.
His most recent releases were three singles, each inspired by and with proceeds going to help humanitarian crises in South Sudan, Congo, and Palestine. As he ruminates on how he’s formed his ideas about activism through art, he sums it up by saying, “I think artists are responsible for reflecting, critiquing, and stretching what they perceive, systems they see, moments they see, people they know, and damn, it’s tough.” His activism is simply a continuation of his work, his process of noticing and tuning in, and making his listeners aware of things that might slip through their minds as the background noise of the world.
Logan Lamers manages to capture his listeners and bring them back to the earth that they live in. In a world where many of us wear our headphones everywhere, play music in the car and on speakers in the house, his music unwinds the perception that music and our environment are divided entities, and meshes them together with his tracks, a grounding force in a world where music is made of our daydreams.
