Razorshop
In the land of sun, steelband and soca, music is life. But life is noisy and few succeed in the quest for clarity. Lyndon ‘Stonez’ Livingstone stands out as one of those few in the Trinidad music scene to have succeeded in creating a quality of sound that is not only new, fresh and exciting, without losing its identity. And what is soca if not dance music? Born out of a merging of African and Indian rhythms mixed in with a touch of soul, soca music has become the staple of the Caribbean Carnival. The music of celebration and abandon electrified. And where perhaps the most natural fit may have been the R&B sound, the groovy soca sound being pushed by big record labels hoping to sell this Caribbean dance music to a wider audience, Lyndon felt that R&B had stalemated. Dance music, in fact was the closest thing to soca, if just by virtue of the speed. Whether it’s 3 Canal social commentary, or a spicy sweet Dil e Nadan or transforming Destra’s racing road march contender to a sensuous reggae ballad his genius is in his knack for finding hooks and beats beyond the sampling craze to creating a dance music with a sound unmistakably Trinidadian. The meeting of soca and electronica is an unanticipated but perfect fit, but he doesn’t just stop there. There is hip hop mixing with Asian dubs right on top of Machel Montano’s rough sexy exhortations. What Stonez has done by creating ‘soca road remixes’ is to give soca a relevance outside of Carnival. To conjure images of a jumping waving sparkling mass transposed out of the streets of Port of Spain to some chic multi-level nightclub. So old songs, played repeatedly over the short Carnival season get a new lease on life, a sound lift that change dimensions to not just suit the shuffling feet of endless thousands of revelers. On it’s own, electronica has never really been that popular in Trinidad. But Lyndon has managed to create a genre that defies expectations of what Caribbean music is and how and where it fits in and contends on the international music scene.
By BPM Recordz
