Lifestyles of the Laptop Café

Lifestyles of the Laptop Café was conceived as one of seven conceptually-linked releases by James Stinson's group Drexciya and its offshoot projects, and while not conceptually the first in the series, it was the first to be released.[1]

Veering away from the complex science fiction themes of Stinson's work with Drexciya, Lifestyles of the Laptop Café is a more subdued album in content and mood.[2][3] The album's lyrics—often limited per song to single, repeated sentences—express feelings of yearning and loneliness.[2] The opening track, "Eye Contact", revolves around a spoken monologue in which a man falls in love with a woman in an Internet café, beginning a romantic narrative that plays out over the course of the remaining tracks.[4] Musically, the album draws on influences from electro, techno and electropop.[5] Fact's Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy describes its musical style as a "lush and often romantic mid-tempo take on Detroit techno",[1] while Ken Taylor of AllMusic writes that the album is dominated by "jazzy tech-house rhythms".[6] Stinson's production juxtaposes "brisk, scuttling" rhythms with melancholic synthesizer melodies.[3] Several of the album's songs feature Stinson's own vocals.[3]

Lifestyles of the Laptop Cafe was issued by Warp on September 3, 2001.[7] Former label employee Tom Browne recalled its release as being "really low-key".[1] The album's cover art was designed by the graphic design studio The Designers Republic and features a photograph by Matt Pyke of a PowerBook laptop in a forest located near Warp's offices.[1] Keeping with the secrecy of Drexciya, The Other People Place's identity was not publicly disclosed.[1][6] An October 2001 profile by Muzik described the magazine's attempt at contacting The Other People Place for an interview, which was met with a response from "a now defunct e-mail address whose user claimed to be at a console deep beneath the ocean waves somewhere off the coast of Malta".[8] Nonetheless, James Stinson was long rumored to have been behind the project, which was later confirmed following his death in 2002.[6][9]

While initially released to little attention, over the following years the album gradually increased in reputation.[10] Lifestyles of the Laptop Café remained out of print until a petition to re-release the album, prompted by reports of secondhand copies being sold at exceedingly high prices on online retailers such as Discogs, was launched by fans.[11] In response, Warp re-issued the album on vinyl on February 10, 2017.[12] It peaked at number seven on the UK Official Vinyl Albums Chart.[13]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[6]
NME	7/10[14]
Pitchfork	7.8/10 (2002)[5] 8.8/10 (2017)[10]
Resident Advisor	5/5[15]
Spectrum Culture	[4]
Uncut	8/10[3]

In a contemporary review, Mark Richardson of Pitchfork compared Lifestyles of the Laptop Café to Drexciya's work, noting a "similarly rigid" quality, while nonetheless differentiating it as "much more relaxed, with slow-to-mid tempos and a velvety sonic palette", concluding that its charm comes from "its subtlety".[5] Writing in AllMusic, Ken Taylor felt that "every track treats the music respectfully, pushing forward in a very new groove",[6] while NME called it a "warm, inviting and accessible" record.[14] In contrast, Exclaim!'s Cam Lindsay deemed the album unchallenging, unoriginal and "quite dated", suggesting that it would only be worth acquiring by "Warp enthusiasts".[16]

Retrospectively, Lifestyles of the Laptop Café has increased in acclaim. In 2010, Resident Advisor named it the fifteenth best album of the 2000s. Site critic Chris Burkhalter described it as a "touching and human" record that "made Stinson's untimely passing a year later all the more heartbreaking."[17] Resident Advisor's Matt Unicomb wrote that its "subtle genius has since been revealed through the simplicity for which it was criticized", deeming it "one of electronic music's most essential records".[15] Spectrum Culture critic Daniel Bromfield called it "one of the most intimate of all techno records... what makes Lifestyles such a wonderful listen is the deep sense of comfort it imparts despite its robotic composition".[4] Pitchfork's Andy Beta reflected that Stinson "looks out onto a world increasingly disassociated, communicating by computers instead of voices", calling the album "prescient in imagining our current connected-yet-disconnected state", while suggesting that it also anticipated "a shift in how people even interact with electronic music, geared more towards home listening than the club."[10]

• Lifestyles of the Laptop Café at Discogs (list of releases)
• Lifestyles of the Laptop Café at MusicBrainz (list of releases)