Peter Kersten (a.k.a. Lawrence) has a new album on the way via regular home Mule Musiq.

The LP, titled Birds On The Playground, is the Dial Records co-founder’s fourth studio album. In 2018, he released Illusion, which he followed last year with Music For Plants (I+II). Lawrence’s last album on Mule came with 2016’s Yoyogi Park.

The album’s nine tracks were written specifically for Studio Mule, Mule Musiq label head Toshiya Kawasaki’s new audiophile listening bar in Shibuya, Tokyo. Having not been to the bar, Kersten imagined listening to the music on the bar’s vintage sound system, “slightly drunk with an always special drink in my hand,” he says. “The music is therefore also very eccentric and ‘tipsy,’ improvised on acoustic instruments, synthesizers, and computer, combined with recordings I did in Berlin’s central Tiergarten park.”

The record “features deep pulsating music that unfolds its true absorbing character when the auditor listens carefully to the detailed storytelling of Lawrence,” we’re told.

As Birds On The Playground isn’t aimed for the dancefloor, the overall coating of the music is a relaxed, cautious one, that goes beyond the average definition of ambient music. Each track builds up gracefully, in order to present a “mesmerizing musical architecture, that offers new sound dimensions with any fresh listening turn,” the label tells XLR8R.

Continuing the record’s Mule Musiq collaborative affair, the tracks were mastered by label regular Kuniyuki, with the Mule Musiq’s visual artist, Stefan Marx, providing the cover artwork.

You can read more about Lawrence in his XLR8R podcast here.

Tracklisting:

01. Grazing Light
02. Drunken Cats
03. Everglade
04. Highland Spores
05. Birds On The Playground
06. Yufuin No Mori
07. Meadows
08. An Evening AT Studio Mule
09. Donkey’s Dream

Birds On The Playground LP is set to drop on March 26 on 2xLP and digitally. Meanwhile, you can stream clips below.