Tim Lawrence is the author of Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970, as well as Hold on to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983. Tim is a founding co-partner of Lucky Cloud Sound System, which co-hosted Loft-style parties with David Mancuso in London since 2003 and has continued in David’s absence. In 2018 he started a Loft-inspired offshoot party, All Our Friends, where he also DJs. A professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London, he also co-hosts Love Is the Message, a podcast about music, the dance floor and counterculture, available via Patreon and all major podcast outlets. He is currently writing an oral history of David Mancuso and the Loft, 1944-2016.
Seeing Through Flames is a series of auditory assemblages that turn listening into a collective channel of exchange. These sessions open out the ideas and themes of our research strand, Emergency & Emergence, and survey different possibilities of forming solidarity through sound and music. By looking at politics of spiritual transformation and collective imagination, these study-as-listening sessions explore the potential for the poetic and vibrational undoing of the knowledge that underpins concepts of the dominant modes of being, as well as the oppression those modes create to make ourselves and our planet anew.