Over the past few years, James has steadily built a reputation as a vital new voice in electronic music on both sides of the Atlantic. He’s sold out the Barbican and Village Underground in London and a European tour, as well as being named Pitchfork and KCRW’s ‘best new music’ in the US. And his music has been championed by the likes of tastemakers Gilles Peterson, Mary Anne Hobbs, Bradley Zero and actor Cillian Murphy, and from BBC 6Music to NTS.
He isn’t afraid of defying convention. James’s debut album A Louder Silence in 2018 deftly blended IDM and minimalist avant-garde influences with Nina Simone-inspired vocals. He wanted to capture heady nights at London’s long-lost and beloved club Plastic People, where DJs like Floating Points would play jazz in the middle of a set. He followed it with a remix EP, featuring respected leftfielders including Bruce, FaltyDL and Coby Sey, and was invited to perform it on Boiler Room in full.
And yet James refused to stay in one lane. A year later, he released the track ‘Wurlitzer’, an ominous crescendo of neo-classical piano and sub-bass that suggested Aphex Twin and Nils Frahm at Berghain and won acclaim at film festivals thanks to its visual by Hungarian director Balázs Simon. Then came his second, more challenging electronic full-length in 2020, where James continued to flex his experimental side. A clear rebellion against his first record and tellingly-titled Angel in Disguise, the album garnered attention from the dance music world, earning praise from Mixmag, CRACK and DJ Mag.
Third album Magic Seeds is a rebirth of sorts, and his most personal album yet. “It feels more vulnerable and open,” he says. “I’ve never felt like being front and centre, but I find myself in this record.” The album is also his most collaborative. In the beginning, James went into the studio in London and played keys with drummer Leo Taylor (Floating Points Ensemble, Hot Chip, Jai Paul), violinist Raven Bush (Speakers Corner Quartet) and producer/engineer Oli Bayston (whose recent credits include Kelly Lee Owens). “It was just the four of us in a room for one day, improvising and enjoying the thrill of playing together,” he says. “I was thinking of the Talk Talk record Spirit of Eden, the way they wrote it for months in the dark and then heavily edited it afterwards. I wanted that feeling of a real room of musicians, rather than anything too sampled.”
James embarked on the mammoth task of editing those sessions down into songs with laser-like precision over the following two years. The live recordings, as well as the analogue synthesisers, lends the album an organic pulse and rhythmic looseness, while its cavernous atmosphere and grainy layers call to mind trip-hop giants Massive Attack and hip-hop producer Madlib. Opening track and lead single ‘Smoke in the Air’ sets the scene, spectral and gently hypnotic. There are often literary and artistic references in James’s music but here it was the “barren romance” of the film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Like many songs on Magic Seeds, ‘Smoke in the Air’ also evokes the wonder of the natural world but also the threat to it, underlined by gritty, DJ Shadow-influenced bass. The album has a strong sense of foreboding, but a lightness that pulls you through to the end.
James is interested in sonic dynamics, the light and the shade, reflecting the contrasts of real life. “A lot of music nowadays is as loud and as compressed as possible. It’s instant impact for commercial gain. But the dynamic records, where things are really loud at points and then really quiet, if someone is brave enough to do that, I love that. I find it challenging and interesting. I like records that give you the unexpected.”
There are plenty of unexpected moments on Magic Seeds – see the choir bursts and slinky yet ominous rhythm of ‘Forest Of Love’, or the motorik groove and psychedelic churn of ‘Measure of Mind’. These are themes, both personal, societal and environmental, that reveal themselves subtly throughout Magic Seeds. It’s in the mystical title and striking cover art by Jonathan Zawada that shows red, lightning-like roots spreading into the earth, to songs like harp-filled ditty ‘Wake Up Spring’, the life-affirming ‘Alive’ and ‘Euphoria’ – an especially evocative track, with lambent tapestry of guitar, sun-dappled synth, off-kilter drums and piercing falsetto. But James is also considering the need to “reseed” humanity after a turbulent number of years, to go back to basics. “We need to rethink our approach to society and how we come together,” he says.
Elsewhere, he has leaned into 90s electronic influences on ‘Inner Child’, boasting a delicious wob-wob and tense strings that contrast the Jeff Buckley-rivalling vocals. Or there’s the tumbling UK bass of ‘Lay’, James’s ode to his formative years in mid-2000s London clubs, where genres like house, garage and dubstep would collide. One inspiration came from an unlikely source: over his dad’s fence. His neighbour is Jagz Kooner, who worked with Primal Scream and was in Sabres In Paradise with Andrew Weatherall, and James would often pop across to share the kernels of Magic Seeds with him, listening to the album surrounded by countryside. “My next record is probably going to be a dance record,” says James. “I have a burning need to do that.”
For now, Magic Seeds illuminates James as one of those rare composers who is capable of taking listeners to great highs and plunging them into inky depths; moody and moving music that feels equally airy, as if it was composed outside, under the moon – which, he jokes, is exactly where he hopes people will listen to it. And though there are tracks that are more songs than soundscapes, he eschews formulas for musical freedom. It’s an ambitious record that could work both in open spaces and in dank clubs – as long as there is a smoke machine, of course. But more than anything, it feels as if it’s living and breathing; a sonic collage of James’s past few years whirled into one.
