Classical Curves is the first full-length album by Jack Latham, a young English electronic producer who goes by the name Jam City. Some claimed influences for the album are marble, trenchcoats, and "oily black Jeep windows." These are opaque things, hard things, things that reflect and conceal. The music isn't much different. Latham's previous releases for the Night Slugs label-- two EPs and the one-off "Arpjam"-- were flat, glaring, and high-tech. Classical Curves isn't much different, only more distilled. Some electronic musicians strive to make their sound as humanistic as possible; Classical Curves is basically disinfectant set to a beat. It borrows its jazz chords from artists like Prince and the 1980s electro-soul group Zapp-- artists who found glamor in the cleanliness of machines. It's an album of bangers, though less in the vernacular sense than in the sense that it often sounds like stuff banging together.
About a minute into the album's intro, we hear the sound of breaking glass. Then more glass. Then a little more. Then, as it transitions into "Her", a drum machine that sounds like a jackhammer and a flurry of camera shutters. "The Courts"-- a single Latham released in advance of the album-- is built on a web of what sounds like new sneakers being streaked across freshly waxed wood. Later on, dogs bark over some more broken glass. In all likelihood you'll know whether this album will repulse you within about two minutes. There's a good chance it may. Latham's single-mindedness, though, is a rare and admirable quality-- a quality that makes Classical Curves sound more like one long, continuous idea than a series of discrete tracks.
As with all Night Slugs' best releases, Classical Curves creates a world that belongs to the music-- a visual world, a world of ideas. The album's cover is a slick little motorbike lying on its side in a marble atrium in front of a huge fern, with a silky yellow piece of fabric draped over a wall behind the bike. It's a seductive image, an image of perfect objects in an imperfect, disarrayed scene. During a recent email exchange, Latham didn't share with me exactly where the shot-- or some accompanying videos-- were taken, but he mentioned that a year ago he worked for a company "stealing and selling information about their rivals," a job that forced him to spend a lot of time hanging out in similar kinds of lobbies, spaces he calls "glamorous looking in a kind of... corporate, rich-people way, I suppose... but pretty lonely and alienating and not the safest career option." At another point in his career, he produced chrome prostheses for fashion shows. One track here is called "How We Relate to the Body." Latham's answer, I imagine, is "with ambivalence and heavy machinery."
Beauty, bodies, science fiction, ideas of cleanliness and perfection-- it's all suggested here in sound. In a lot of ways, this album is more conceptually in touch with prime-era Kraftwerk or, as previously mentioned, early industrial music: music that highlights its own sense of soul by being as comprehensively soulless as possible. This is music that achieves as much of its effect through silence as through sound: Between every beat, the space is so absolute and empty that getting to the next piece of solid ground is a kind of perpetual thrill. Not a warm one, not a nice one, just a perpetual one, one that mechanically follows the one before it, no variation, no room for error.
