By this point, Loraine James needs little introduction. For much of the last decade, she has been one of London’s most consistently innovative and emotionally expressive club producers, building a reputation over a series of albums of questioning electronica, expert sound design, and shapeshifting beats, whether it’s the watercolour techno of records like For You and I (2019) and Reflection (2021), the Julius Eastman-homage Building Something Beautiful for Me (2022), or her extraordinary ambient work under the name Whatever the Weather. James is also one of the city’s most compelling live performers: a mind-expanding, pre-pandemic set at New River Studios—a hotspot for experimental and underground sound in the capital—was my first exposure to her work. Yet for all this output and critical adoration, she remains a somewhat cult figure whose music deserves more attention than it gets, especially beyond her home city.
Exactly why this might be, it’s hard to say. How much it matters, even more so, as James does have a significant and committed audience; it’s just that her body of work so far commands the kind of acclaim one would usually expect to lead to a higher level of international renown. Yet James has never seemed particularly interested in music industry glitz or self-promotion: there has always been a sense of profound understatement to her records, a calm subtlety and unshowiness, which contrasts with her clear aesthetic ambition. On Detached from the Rest of You, a degree of that understatement endures, but is supplemented by a little more openness. There are more hooks here, more direct expressions of emotion, fewer shadows into which to retreat. Sardonically, she’s called it her “IDM pop star album.” This might appear to be a risk for an artist so often perceived as low-key, but Loraine James has never feared risks on the musical level—and in any case, the risk pays off.
All the hallmarks upon which James has built her reputation are present and correct from the start of Detached. Opener “A Long Distance Call” arrives on a riptide of bubbling synth glitches and modulated samples before settling into a delicate but insistent mid-tempo flow, James’ breathy voice gently pitched and manipulated into the gaps between the beats and synth nudges. It’s a track that would feel at home on James’ Hyperdub debut For You and I. As the album progresses, more of the pop ambition James has touched upon moves to the fore, partly thanks to several excellent vocal features. The gorgeous “In A Rut” includes a Nico-like turn from sound artist Sydney Spann; Spann’s fellow New Yorker Ansyia Kym provides a wonderfully organic counterpoint to James’ metallic textures on “Score”, like steam rising through a steel grid; while Low’s Alan Sparhawk offers a mournful focal point for the space-age boom-bap of “Peak Again.”
Perhaps the most transcendent features here, however, come from closer to James’ home in the outer reaches of British electronica, UK bass, and alt-pop. London experimental R&B auteur Tirzah––like James, a genuinely singular artist who seems to navigate the vagaries of the music industry entirely on her own terms––illuminates “Habits and Patterns” with her beacon-like voice, throwing the intricate contours of the track’s production into sharp relief. It’s the record’s most straightforwardly beautiful moment, only rivaled in impact (albeit for different reasons) by the astonishing “Ending Us All,” featuring Loraine James’ longtime collaborator Le3 bLACK and drummer Fyn Dobson. Here, James and her co-conspirators let themselves loose on a shifting terrain of monstrous, writhing percussion and shearing synths, with bLACK’s clear-eyed mic work weaving through the chaos with expert precision.
The raw physicality in the arrangement of “Ending Us All” is an exception on this record; most of Detached from the Rest of You sits back into its instrumentals, allowing the vocals (both from James herself and her many contributors) to lead the way into more accessible territory. Despite James’ semi-serious protestations, this isn’t really a pop album. But that’s not a criticism, or even a refutation of what she may have actually been trying to say. It remains her boldest, most immediate record yet, but she retains a slippery approach to genre, a scientific level of attention to detail, and a painterly eye for subtle shading and allusion. [Hyperdub]
