Aldgate Patterns

Little People is the moniker of UK based downtempo electronic musician Laurent Clerc… He returns with his second full length album - We Are But Hunks Of Wood - a whole 6 years after his first album (Mickey Mouse Operation) was released on Illicit recordings. Whilst his debut - an accomplished ode to late 90's instrumental hip hop - has unexpectedly gone on to be in the top 30 selling album downloads on iTunes in the electronic genre in the US for the last 2 years, he is still all but unknown to most tastemakers and influential blogs shaping today's electronic music scene. Having followed an unconventional route to success - thanks to in no small part to Pandora radio generating him huge amounts of exposure - he seemingly exists outside the normal channels used to promote artists. We sense this is all about to change…

'We are But Hunks of Wood' is a sonic leap forward for LIttle People (that's the least you can expect after a 6 year hiatus between albums!) which should help establish himself as key proponent of the downtempo electronic music scene. Part beats, bleeps and real live instrumentation, this new record maybe falls in a place where Bonobo and Anders Trentemoller would hypothetically meet. Having initially come from the world of instrumental hip hop where tracks are often more akin to just sketches or interesting ideas, Laurent Clerc's pieces are fully fledged songs whose arrangements create a sense of mood and movement, effortlessly going from nuanced electronic patterns to soaring string arrangements over the course of the journey. This is no beat tape.

There are many reasons why it has taken him so long to release his follow up record - like nearly turning his back on making music and becoming the father of a set of twins… But the main reason was that he felt he had to reinvent his work methodology and write and record his tracks from the ground up. He saw sampling as tantamount to taking another man's 2 bars of inspiration and passing it off as your own. The story of the samplist making the jump to creating his own material is not new… but it isn't always a successful one. Laurent took enough time to make sure that leap was taken with aplomb.