The first album that Loraine James recorded as Whatever the Weather advanced a novel concept: Each track was titled after a temperature reading on the Celsius scale, like “25°C” or “6°C,” meant to approximate the artist’s “emotional temperature” when she recorded it. You might imagine the tracklisting as a meteorological map, a patchwork of variegated blues and reds running from frigid cerulean to sweltering scarlet. But in contrast to that prescriptive rubric, Whatever the Weather left questions of relative heat or cold entirely up to the listener. Do the glitching pads of “17°C” sound more like breaking surf or branching ice crystals? Is the wistful piano of “14°C” more evocative of George Winston’s new-age classic Autumn or its sequel, Winter Into Spring? Some might consider that ambiguity a flaw, but I find it refreshing. How easy it could have been to sketch out a self-evident spectrum, from icy drones to balmy Balearic tones, and call it a day. James’ album suggested that synesthesia is as messy as our feelings themselves.
She sticks with the concept on Whatever the Weather II. This time, the metaphorical scale is a little less severe: from 1°C (a frosty 34°F) to 26°C (a summery but not oppressive 79°F), in contrast to the former album, which flitted between the freezing point and the brink of a heat wave. Perhaps accordingly, the new record’s stylistic range is comparatively abbreviated. Whatever the Weather wandered freely across the tranquility of ambient, the itchy restlessness of IDM, and the aggression of drum’n’bass, even folding in a few vocal passages influenced by Midwestern emo. WtWII is more focused, with a palette organized around muted synth pads, minimalist arrangements, and faint dustings of digital distortion. The last album often used ambient as a gateway to more unpredictable zones; on the new one, it’s a homing beacon.
The new album’s relative coherence might have something to do with the intent behind its making. The first album grew out of stray productions created during the recording of 2021’s Reflection; it also included a few five-year-old project files that James had never found a home for. This time, she cleared her studio schedule in order to concentrate on new Whatever the Weather material, following a first-thought-best-thought approach—hardware synths, effects pedals, little in the way of overdubs—that favored intuition and flow.
The result is some of the most direct, spontaneous music in James’ catalog. Tracks feel less like songs or compositions than tone poems, mood pieces that flow naturally from one to the next, like clouds changing shape high overhead. After a brief scene-setting intro (“It’s a bit chilly, innit?” James muses over glitching pads and vocal samples in “1°C”), “3°C” pairs hopeful synth pads with faint glitches and squeals, suggesting the subtle drama of emotional liftoff; on the following “18°C,” the same chords curl inward and darken, sounding more guarded despite the ostensibly warmer forecast.
Some of the loveliest tracks are the simplest: “8°C” is nothing but a single plangent synthesizer melody, as if Boards of Canada had muted all the tracks on their mixing desk but one; “23°C (Intermittent Sunshine)” repeats a single loop of microtonal harmonies, like a locked groove of wind chimes. But not everything is so minimalist. “5°C” offsets the synthetic chimes of daytime talk shows with the chiseled blips of experimental techno. The burbling organs of “9°C” gradually thicken and smear, fleetingly bringing to mind the drone fantasia at the beginning of Gastr del Sol’s Upgrade & Afterlife. In the most rhythmically intricate track, “15°C,” a jittery percussive pattern runs alongside a pair of flickering chords and erratic bursts of static; almost but seemingly not quite in sync, it sounds like a lo-fi approximation of early Autechre held together with faulty patch cables and Scotch tape.
In a few cases, tracks unspool like mini-movies, compressing multiple scenes into compact frames. “20°C” incorporates the background noise of a small crowd—a lively breakfast café, perhaps—along with music-box melodies, skittering braindance grooves, and the buzz of a vibrating smartphone; the closing “12°C” progresses across field-recorded footsteps, gravelly bass tones, a sample-pocked stretch of ruminative downtempo, and then, finally, an unexpected detour into folktronica, complete with acoustic guitars and loping cowboy rhythms. No temperature reading can accurately capture that kind of range. But that’s precisely the point: Whatever the mercury may say, James’ capricious mood pieces go wherever their internal winds may take them.
