The electronic music that Phil Tortoroli makes as James Place is usually layered and abstract—not exactly what you’d call music with a message. But there’s clear meaning in “Courage to Ask,” the opening track of his new album, Voices Bloom. Over a sharp beat and dramatic synth tones, Tortoroli samples Maya Angelou praising, “The courage to ask, to ask, ‘Will you be my brother?’,” and ends with a bite of James Baldwin insisting, “All men are brothers. That’s the bottom line.”
Nothing else is that lucid on Voices Bloom, but the positivity of Angelou and Baldwin echoes throughout the rest of the album. In the past, Tortoroli has often buried his beats under dense surges of sound, but here he pulls them closer the surface, giving everything an insistent momentum. His synths and samples are generally brighter now, more like sunbeams than stormclouds. There are still many moods in Tortoroli’s music; he doesn’t let the light block out dour themes. But overall, Voices Bloom earns the optimism of its title.
In fact, for anyone familiar with James Place, some tracks on Voices Bloom are surprisingly bouncy. “Robin Weep,” which follows “Courage to Ask,” feels eminently dancefloor-ready, with its clicking beat and rippling synths relentlessly pushing air. “Rumor and Choir” has a similarly excited pulse, plus a nearly-giddy sense of humor via an organ loop that evokes a carnival carousel. Yet neither track trades pace for depth; throughout, Tortoroli paints textures onto his bubbling canvases that give them new hues when viewed from different angles.
One of those textures comes from Sam Sally, a singer who Tortoroli has collaborated with in the past when she would send him isolated vocal tracks to use. Searching for a layer to add to Voices Bloom, he dipped back into an old folder of her files, and incorporated them into some of the album’s most stirring cuts. Her contributions shine most vividly on “Move in Blue,” whose ice-blue beats melt into her sky-seeking presence. It’s a pretty simple formula—ethereal voices over cloudy music—but Tortoroli arranges those elements in such a way that you can never quite pinpoint the song’s character.
That knack for making music feel emotionally three-dimensional is what connects Voices Bloom to Tortoroli’s previous work. This kind of moody electronic music is all about choices: presented with infinite options inside the machine, how do you choose which sounds will be the most resonant, and stick in the memory instead of floating pasting ears? Tortoroli excels at that kind of decision making. Take closer “Wild Theme Unseen.” By far the album’s longest cut at 10 minutes, it continually rises in waves of synths buttressed by small rhythmic clicks. Structurally, it’s an outlier on the album, since it’s almost solely about repetition. But thematically, it’s exactly right: upbeat music that contains downbeats, on a bright album that’s not afraid of the dark.
