Bleep

Loraine James has had a total victory lap of a year. Riding the wave of restless energy from 2021’s Reflection, she released three scintillating projects throughout 2022: the ecstatic 053 EP with TSVI on AD 93; Building Something Beautiful For Me on Phantom Limb, a suite of reinterpretations and responses to pioneering composer James Eastman’s work; and Whatever The Weather, an uplifting work that has kept us coming back like no other.

Like many records still trickling out of 2020 lockdown sessions, Whatever The Weather was born in a time of turbulence. Staying indoors brought an opportune stillness that turned out to be ripe for creation. James seems to have approached things casually, improvising until things felt finished. Although the climate concept didn’t come until later, this “free-flowing” work process owes itself to analogies with the natural world, as ideas gush into a stream of consciousness.

In that way, “Whatever The Weather” is less of a title and more of a methodology. Yes, the eleven tracks on this project’s debut LP are defined by degrees in Celsius, but its sonic connections to the Earth’s patterns go far beyond what can be read on a thermometer. Shaken free from any constraints of “club music”, the music of Whatever The Weather takes on its own forms, moving in and out like the tides across its tidy runtime. Put together under this new alias, Loraine James explores a more playful, freeform approach, and her improvisations have a certain transience not unlike a rapidly changing climate.

Ghostly International have certainly been innovators in the changing music landscape, especially when it comes to ambient music, making James a great fit amongst their star-studded roster. While the rich atmospheres found throughout the album softly envelop the listener, it’s important that Whatever The Weather doesn’t get pigeonholed into one descriptor. It’s not “ambient as beatless”; there are plenty of dance-adjacent rhythms. It’s not exactly a “chillout” album, and it’s certainly not background music either. Instead, the atmospheres James curates are snapshots of times and moments, where each listen ekes out new feelings and memories. Each track is its own ephemeral season, governed by the fluctuating forces of nature and captured in song.

Take, for instance, the opening ‘25°C’ with its soft hum and bucolic ripples of keys. Its misty vocals recall the Summer rain that precedes a floral bloom, meandering and strolling through the undulating grassy plains of sonic pastures. These textures, whispering through her usual dance output, now revel in a spotlight of their own, flowing into the static and steely beats of ‘0°C’, where breath escapes from scarf-covered faces forming visible plumage in the air. Synths frost the edges of this muffled soundworld, melting with the stuttering monsoon of ‘17°C’. It isn’t all so pastoral, as this track reminds of the ways development alters the natural world, with car horns, screeching brakes, and crosswalk chatter paired against some familiar (one might say reflective) jolt-y percussion, the urban crowd’s footsteps forming bustling breakbeats as they march over the city’s pavements. Perhaps James is channelling her London home here; there’s something very British about the tracklist’s unpredictable shifts in weather.

Emotions alter as the temperature dips, predicted by the rumbling thunderclouds of ‘2°C (Intermittent Rain)’. What sounds like a violin blurred beyond recognition on ‘6°C’ evokes snow laden streets and white skies, reinforced by the throttling blizzard of ‘4°C’: spaced out footwork with snapping icicles and snares shovelling snow. Ghostly vocals call out to the snowblind, their reflections ever changing in the ice glazing the roads. As the world turns, the Sun returns on ‘30°C’, emerging from the long night of Winter to free the skin from the biting cold with picturesque techno-like rhythms, and one of the album’s few lyrical moments: “You see the light again, you see the fight again.” Weather closes with the ambient-leaning revelry ‘36°C’: the LP’s hottest track sports a soaring synth melody of shimmering rays painted in orange and bronze that rises across a five minute runtime until a short, glitchy fade out. Summer does always seem to end too soon.

Returning from a strong 2021, Loraine James has endeavoured on an even stronger 2022, releasing yet another incredible collection of electronic music that has defined our year, and will surely set the forecast for the next.