Bleep

Disparate influences have always found room to grow in Loraine James’ electronica and ambient-minded music: from her teenage discoveries of nu-metal and math rock to the R&B and drill that went into 2021’s Reflection, and traces of jazz hidden in her freely morphing melodies and glitches. With her 3rd release of 2022, she wears one particular inspiration on her sleeve, diving into the works of the late pioneering composer Julius Eastman to create radical reinterpretations and responses to his catalogue.

James and Eastman are perhaps kindred spirits separated by time. Both queer Black artists who are fearlessly themselves, grounded in emotional experimentation and contemplating their inner landscapes through music that pulls from all sources. Eastman is regarded as one of the first to “introduce pop tonal progressions and free improvisation in an art context”, his minimalist compositions containing multitudes of honest emotion. His philosophy of “organic music” is something James taps into across the album, sitting in the spaces of different moods and coaxing them to evolve as they carry their past experiences into new sections.

The rising arpeggios of Eastman’s 1973 work ‘Stay On It’ are transformed in the opening ‘Maybe If I’, a blue haze of candid vocal meditations and scattered percussion. ‘The Perception Of Me’ reshapes itself across its 8 minute runtime, the contemplative mode of its textural palettes growing in intensity, from tiptoeing to stomping with heartbeat-like kicks and rippling pianos glitching and distorting till they crash. Boisterous live drums and buoyant synths meet on ‘Enfield, Always’, driving each other into a whirlpool of spiralling directions.

Building Something Beautiful For Me is an apt and heartfelt homage to Julius Eastman’s transformative compositions, and further proof that 2022 is Loraine James’ year.