Peter M. Kersten may not be a name that's readily on the tip of everyone's lips but as a man of many guises and styles it is only a matter of time before the dots start to merge and the bigger picture is revealed. On his and Carsten Jost's Kompakt affiliated Dial label he has released numerous 12"s under the name of Sten in what might be termed a more minimal techno style. As Lloyd he makes abstract hip hop, there's an 'in progress' ambient guitar project called Bordeaux and then of course there's Lawrence.

With the third Lawrence long player 'The Night Will Last Forever' set for release this summer, Peter M. Kersten continues his journey into deep and melancholic ambience. Spiced with humour and light, Lawrence soaks up the grey droplets from Germany's own 'rainy city', Hamburg and blurs them into the ethereal edges of his soothing, glitch speckled electronic rhythms. What we ultimately find is something glowing in melody and soul and gorgeous electronic house grooves that serenade the listener before being bathed in washes of glistening luminescence. Not bad for someone who, as a child, began his musical journey surrounded by his parents dire record collection and became fascinated by church organs.

"I was totally lost in fantasy as a child," recalls Lawrence. "My wishes were changing constantly. Being an organist was one of the wishes I remember but I hated church." The churches loss is our gain for, as the young Lawrence became a teenager the 80s paved way for the likes of The Cure, Gary Numan, Depeche Mode and early Chicago house all of which were eagerly absorbed by Mr. Kersten's radio and tape recorder. Then in 1988 Lawrence had an acid house epiphany. Entering the hallowed doors of Hamburg's Front Club, a gay club influenced by the early Chicago house scene, was "the most important club in my life." It was to become an institution, bringing this weird new house, techno and acid house to Hamburg and to Lawrence's ears. "Before I entered it I had heard mix tapes of Karl Heinz Stockhausen and Boris Dlougosch all the time," he remembers fondly," but The Front changed my life."

Thus a musical transition was to begin and by 1997 Peter began producing his own music with his first release appearing two years later on the fledgling Dial imprint. Confessing to a love of deep Detroit house from the likes of Theo Parrish to the concrete universe of Matthew Herbert his music rolls and shimmers with delicate bass lines and subtle nuances that evoke emotion at every twist and turn. Yet being a man obsessed by music in all its forms, Peter has also flexed his talented muscles into other variations of the art.

"The different projects stand somehow close to another," he says. "Sten is the more minimal and straight part of me, strictly influenced by the part of my life on the dancefloor. I also enjoy lots of hip hop artists like Foreign Exchange, Jaydee and Roots Manuva. Lloyd is maybe an experiment to produce hip hop with minimal music production." Then there is Bordeaux, his guitar based band with three guitars and a bass guitar staffed by Turner, Carsten Jost, Peter and Martin Hossbach, the owner of the Masseundmacht label. "We play a kind of minimal music, pattern based ambience," he says of the groups sound. All in all, a rather diverse set of styles that Peter Kersten appears to have mastered with ease.

However, it is with his Lawrence project that he has most recently come to prominence. A nom de plume that he feels is not hidden behind any mask or facade but just another part of his life as a musician. The first eponymous 'Lawrence' album (Ladomat, 2002) was a mixture of house, minimal techno and experimental pieces that were "very moody, soundscape loving and sometimes very strange." The second one, 'The Absence of Blight' (Dial, 2003) had a straighter touch "deep and melancholic, emotive and tragic but ultimately happy." For his latest album, 'The Night Will Last Forever' (novamute, 2005), we see Lawrence fitting all the ideas from the first two albums into a moving narrative of subtle clicks, pops and emotive turns that sparkle in the eternal dim of the night's midnight sunshine.

From the opening delicate piano on 'Lost Images' and the deep bass lines and atmospheric melody of first single 'Swap' to the closing melancholic refrains of 'Leave Me Tomorrow' we are gradually sucked in to the perpetual twilight of Lawrence's nocturnal world. Whether he be DJing at his Hamburg residencies at The Golden Pudel or Click, remixing the likes of Martin Gore, Goldfrapp, Turner or Superpitcher, producing hip hop, minimal techno, guitar based bands or ambient soundscapes and even organizing parties for local Anti-Fascist groups, Peter M. Kersten's days of anonymity are most definitely numbered. For Lawrence's night's will indeed last forever.