At just 27 years old, London-based composer Loraine James is already considered one of the most exciting voices in the British avant-garde electronic scene, a fact confirmed by her magnificent fifth album, Gentle Confrontation, published last Friday. An album, she explains to Duty ahead of her performance at the Pop Montréal festival, inspired by her teenage memories as much as by her discovery of the work of African-American composer Julius Eastman, which she reinterpreted last year on the album Building Something Beautiful for Me.
A few days before the release of this album, in October 2022, Loraine James was invited to give a unique concert in tribute to Eastman at the Southbank Center in London, accompanied by the young London Contemporary Orchestra, specialist in modern music and their encounters with each other. . “It was one of the greatest experiences of my life,” says Loraine James. “I never imagined that one day a work that I composed on the computer would be transformed in this way by a large orchestra. The experience really helped me approach the composition of my new album as I thought about it more outside of the computer — and it’s all thanks to Julius Eastman. »
It was also a first commissioned work for the young composer: the Phantom Limb label had precisely in mind the project for her to reinterpret, in complete freedom, the work of this composer whom she did not yet know. “I was familiar with the work of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, but this was a discovery” that had a profound impact on her. “I hope that other musicians will in turn be inspired by [l’]work” of this black and queer post-minimalist composer, who died in 1990 at the age of 49, and whose work, ingenious and powerful, is only beginning to be rediscovered.
On the title song of Gentle Confrontation at the opening of the album, long violins blow like a burst of heat before a nervous breakbeat cracks after a minute. A first nod to Eastman, setting the table for nearly an hour of intricate rhythms, inherited from jungle, IDM, juke and, more pronouncedly, jazz (on the excerpt I DM Uwith the participation of Morgan Simpson, drummer of Black Midi) and R&B, “since I knew from the start that these two genres would be at the heart of the album”, explains Loraine James, who however had not anticipated that the voice would take up so much space.
The intention behind the tone
His, in the first place – in the tone of the story (or of the confidence?) at the end of the title song, more sung on 2003, following. “I certainly wouldn’t call myself a ‘singer’,” she adds, “but I don’t care about it either. My tone is not great, I will never sound like Mariah Carey… I have a more spoken word to use my voice, which fits better with the music”, often very close to the codes of ambient music, like the album she launched in April 2022 under the pseudonym Whatever the Weather and which she came to present in Montreal during the penultimate edition of the Mutek festival.
“Above all, I have the impression that my voice is never the most important element of my songs,” she adds with the greatest respect for those of her friends and collaborators Marina Herlop (heard on the brilliant While They Were Singing), George Riley (the neo-R&B singer will release a new mini-album in November) and Contour, whose airy voice closes Loraine’s album with tenderness on the song Saying Goodbye. “I wouldn’t want my voice to sound perfect in a song anyway. It’s the intention behind the tone, the softness, the restraint, that matters when I sing. »
And even more so when it comes to his family. With Gentle ConfrontationLoraine James believes she made the album “that the adolescent [qu’elle était] would have wanted to do”, even going so far as to sample the artists who marked her during this formative period, Dntel, Lusine and Telefon Tel Aviv – note that the composer already had refined musical tastes! “I discovered this music on my own, without the influence of members of my family”, none of whom had any musical training, although his mother played the steel pan (James family roots are Jamaican and not Trinidadian).
A lot of emotions emerge from these sixteen new compositions, starting with melancholy. This album, she tells us, is a bit in memory of her father, who died twenty years ago this year. One of the most touching is at the heart of Gentle Confrontation and is titled Cards with the Grandparents. We hear them talking around the table, shuffling the cards, while a melody, played on an out-of-tune organ, loops over delicate breakbeats.
“If I sing more, if I have written richer texts, it is because I talk about my family,” notes the musician, who thus moves away from the club music through which she came into the world on the London underground scene. “And it’s interesting because I still play a lot of clubs, even though a lot of the music I make isn’t really designed to make people dance. However, when I play, I sometimes present faster and more rhythmic versions of my compositions,” specifies Loraine, who says she listens to a lot of “super fast music” these days, while toying with the idea of starting to work on a second Whatever the Weather album.