Critic's Choice

Along with Doc Martin, Christopher Lawrence, June 14 at The Church, has helped make the Los Angeles club scene respectable. Yet unlike Martin -- who's famous for his excursions into deep house -- Lawrence focuses primarily on the trance genre: the techno offshoot built around beautiful synthesizer lines and hypnotic drum programming that BT and the now-split Sasha & Digweed brought to American shores from its launching pad on the Spanish island of Ibiza. The year 2000 saw a Stateside explosion of interest in the Mediterranean-based electronic form (also called progressive), with kids running to the nearest record store to pick up anything with the name "Ibiza" printed on the cover sleeve. Lawrence is one of the artists enjoying the sound's current vogue status: His most recent mix CD, January's United States of Trance, helped revive Moonshine Record's expiring United States series; he also recently landed on the cover of the glossy DJ magazine Mixer. In L.A. -- a nice match for his emotional and future-sounding beats -- the once-regional mixer now finds himself working the same clubs as Germany's Paul Van Dyke and the UK's legendary Paul Oakenfold. His excursion to The Church should give local trance DJs a perfect opportunity to see how the genre sounds when mixed by a master.