Love Lake
By: Sam Gelfand
Sometimes music can just find you. That’s what I was thinking about last week. I was sitting alone at night with my headphones on, absorbing the amazing sounds of a musician I was hearing for the first time. I had gone out on date the previous Saturday night, and the conversation turned to music – that’s when she told me her brother was a musician. Love Lake is the band/project, and Anders Carlson is the brother, or I guess, the man. His music is free. It’s swinging. It’s amazing. But you’ve never heard of him before, because he’s been in his bedroom.
The songs usually begin with a simple beat, slowly expanding until there are a variety of sounds creeping into your ears. “I mixed it myself,” he explained, “so every time I’d go to mix it, I’d hear a melody or percussion part that I needed to add.”
Carlson’s most engrossing track, “Ghost,” feels like it was built from the ground up. There are little bits of percussion beating in the background, but the instrumental portion of the song uses everything from piano to guitar and bass to what sounds like a triangle. It’s almost impossible to imagine that such a rich production came primarily from one person sitting in his bedroom, but Anders swears that he does exactly that. “My process is real sloppy. I’ll just throw a mic on the ground next to an amp and press record so I can capture some spontaneity.”
The Love Lake EP, released online in September of 2010, is Carlson’s first great success. Throughout all ten tracks, he utilizes a vast array of instrumentation and shows off a knack for simple but visual lyrics. The whole thing is a bit of a journey through some of the more eclectic places on the musical map. But immersing yourself in his work proves to be an immensely rewarding experience.
Because he labors over tracks for so long, and with such care, it will be interesting to see if he can maintain the quality of his music when pressed to create material in a more spontaneous manner. “I want to limit the amount of overdubbing I do,” he admits, “and try to get some of that live sound.”
Just a few weeks ago, Love Lake’s second set of material was released to the world. “Telephone” is the most impressive song in this release. It’s very similar to his earlier work, in that he still has lengthy sustaining guitar chords flowing over staccato melodies, with all of this layered between the fuzzed-out vocal effect that Anders clearly prefers. Despite the similarity, “Telephone” and the other two singles, “After Innocence” and “Broken Cookie,” sound more advanced. More sophisticated.
“Broken Cookie” sounds like a drunken night of debauchery in Hawaii, which is a pretty nice vacation from real life for somebody whose sitting in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. The way that the rhythms work together is quite complex, and yet they sound so rudimentary at first listen. His tracks also utilize voice samples from his girlfriend. “I love things that sound stupid and out of place in recordings,” Anders told me. “But you have to do it tastefully.”
It’s amazing that songs of this quality are hiding in a random bedroom in a suburb of St. Paul. It’s almost as if somebody took a sound from each part of the world, and collected them all into the same pile and sorted them out. Love Lake is a project that goes past a singular style or a singular emotion. It’s so complex and deeply layered and sophisticated that the only real way to understand it is to connect to it in a way that only you can.
Mr. Carlson could have some pretty big things ahead of him, but for now, he’s playing two shows at Nick and Eddie’s in Minneapolis – on June 23rd and July 29th. I’ll be there. Come down and listen to what he has to offer you. I guarantee you that there will be something you’ll love. But you have to do it tastefully.