In Memorium to Lawrence Braithwaite

RIP Lawrence Braithwaite

In the beginning was the word and the word was bass. And the bass was good and Gawd saw that it was good and Gawd said and Gawd left plenty. Gawd left notes and files and jams and cycles…. and Vico saw that Homer saw and Virgil heard and cyphered the story of blindness and loss of self and he turn Us all into brave warriors who feared nadathin, and refused to forget and stepped to fate like like yänkee and fadayee,– lawrence ytzhak braithwaite — “T U R N T A B L E I N T E R R O G A T I O N T E C H N I Q U E S”

Lawrence Braithwaite recently died, I am not going to lie and claim I’ve been a huge fan of his over the years, I just discovered him through his death. Dodie Bellamy wrote a memorial on her blog and that’s how I got wind of him. He’s pretty revolutionary, his most famous accomplishments are two novels “Wigger” and “Ratz are Nice.” Dodie Bellamy describes his written work as “(his work) thrusts you into the middle of worlds you may know nothing about, but always keeps you outside of it too, so you can’t colonize the text, nor characters, with simple, privileged ‘understanding.’ I’ve always loved the way he insists on maintaining that otherness, in his writing, and in his life too.”

He recorded music, under the name Lord Patch, that is similiar to artists like Saul Williams and Tricky but waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more fantastic, with lyrics like “We can’t afford no gas,” “We broke broke broke,” he’s a surrealist phenomena, his work draws influences from the musical and social realism of punk rock, opera, musique concrète, noise, hip hop, rap, industrial, black metal, country music and dub and I think the poet he samples on one of the tracks Dodie posted on her blog is Charles Bukowski – if anyone can confirm that as a fact please let me know because that is fucking brilliant. Now, the next thing I’m going to do is grab a copy of his book “Wigger,” it’s been hailed as hyper surreal.

If you know Lawrence Braithwaite’s family please let me know because I know of some people that are working on a project and would like to contact his family, thanks!

And for those of you that enjoy the tracks I’ve posted, go to his myspace page and download all the rest of the free stuff he left us. RIP Lord Patch!