Loraine James’ music often feels like it’s on the verge of tipping into chaos. Competing rhythms run out of sync, throwing sparks as they scrape. Straight lines bend without warning, and smooth surfaces splinter. Rather than conform to a flawlessly efficient rhythmic grid, the London electronic musician’s beats twitch and hiccup, as though driven by a MIDI clock gone haywire. That’s as true of James’ quiet moments as her noisy ones: Even the most dulcet passages tend to jitter and glitch. A similar sort of unpredictability plays out across the breadth of her catalog. James has been putting out music for a while now; in addition to her debut album, last year’s thrilling For You & I, she has a string of Bandcamp-only releases going back to 2015, comprising brightly colored electronica, contorted club edits, and even ambient-adjacent atmospheres. No two records encompass quite the same style; neither do any two songs. Every track feels like the product of a blank slate. Her music is exhilarating in the fashion of a gamble that pays off against long odds, or a gambit that shouldn’t work yet somehow, miraculously, does.
The four-track Nothing EP breaks new ground in four different directions. It is darker, on the whole, than For You & I; that album’s dreaminess has curdled, and its industrial punch—like the noise-rap beats of “London Ting // Dark as Fuck,” a song so concussive it could send clipping. running for cover—feels further corroded here, one fried circuit away from total breakdown. The most obvious change is the incorporation of vocalists, something James hasn’t done much of in the past. Early in 2020, she made an open call for singers on Twitter, and three of Nothing’s four tracks feature the fruits of those collaborations. Rather than spotlighting her featured vocalists, however, James tends to fold them deeply into the mix, where their voices turn murky, communicating more with texture than language.
In the opening “Nothing,” the Uruguayan singer-producer Lila Tirando a Violeta moans, “I don’t feel nothing,” dolefully and almost indecipherably, her voice clouded by reverb, while rapid-fire arpeggios zigzag between vintage trance, the ice-castle maximalism of Rustie, and the jittery dissonance of early-’80s synth pop. The lurching kick/snare sequence balances the knitting-needle bounce of trap hi-hats with clanking metal and what might be a brief snippet of jackhammer. It makes for a jarring take on numbness—not a deadening blanket of sound, but an anxious, needling feeling, like the tingling of a limb that’s fallen asleep.
She goes darker still on “Marg,” featuring the Iranian-born, Liverpool-based rapper Tardast, who grew up in Tehran and came to the UK in 2014. The title is Farsi for “death”; his lyrics, also rapped in Farsi, address the refugee experience in images of slippery ice and clipped wings. Occasionally, he cuts to the chase, as if no metaphor could contain his abjection: “Life’s getting worse every day.” His voice is mixed low, an unsteady burble of mutters and whispers surrounded by splotchy synths and heavy, distorted drums that crumple on impact. Layers of percussion—handclaps, hi-hats, tambourines, laser zaps—fall in uneven volleys, landing just shy of their mark, like shots clustered around a bullseye. Anxious and unsteady, the song feels like a harbinger of things coming apart, its joylessness an indictment of systemic failure.
The tenor of the EP shifts in the second half. “Don’t You See It?” gets its melancholy tone from stately minor-key piano chords; HTRK’s Jonnine Standish sings wistfully of loss and yearning, with a resigned tone that recalls Bodily Functions-era Dani Siciliano. James’ production contrasts forcefully; the beat sounds like it’s been made from a lossy YouTube rip of crunching metal or breaking glass. Standish’s singing is the clearest on the album, and while her writing seems purposefully vague she lands a few truly memorable lines—“Summer is a traitor, ’cause summer’s moving on.” Even so, her voice serves mainly as the foil to James’ jagged beats, the soft underbelly of a hard-angled exoskeleton. At the song’s finale, following a climax powered by the record’s heaviest bass, James runs Standish’s voice through some kind of granular effect, crumbling her syllables like flakes of mica.
The closing “The Starting Point,” the EP’s only instrumental, offers a stripped-down contrast to what has preceded it. The one-note bassline nags at the midrange; the brittle beat has the spikiness of early instrumental grime, while snapping syncopations flash back to UK garage at its rowdiest. Drawing on vintage IDM, what used to be called “abstract” electronica, and the example set by her Hyperdub labelmates, James’ productions have typically been part of a lineage of experimental dance music that doesn’t necessarily cater to the dancefloor, but “The Starting Point,” lean and muscular, proves James’ club mettle. It’s an exciting capstone to an EP that refuses to play by anyone else’s rules.
Buy: Rough Trade
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