A meteorologist given to metaphor might listen to Loraine James’ short instrumental sketch “2°C (Intermittent Rain)” and say that the air over the city was streaked with leaden synthesizers, inclement reverb, and the steady pitter-pat of dissolving cymbal taps. An empath might listen to the track and realize that no matter how dreary the day, James clearly found something beautiful in the grayscale swirl. When James herself Zooms in from her apartment in Leytonstone, London, the temperature outside nearly matches that of her song—not that she’s letting the chill affect her. “I haven’t really been out too much, to be honest,” she admits, swaddled in a thick black hoodie and a cream-colored baseball cap. “It’s very at-home vibes.”
James’ new project is called Whatever the Weather, and its self-titled debut is characterized by an unusual gambit: Every song describes a different temperature. The beatless “25°C” paints a picture of radiant, sun-warmed bliss; the jagged rhythms of “0°C” are as brittle as the thin ice over a sidewalk puddle. (For those unaccustomed to the Celsius scale, the album might also double as a handy cheat sheet.)
A collection of ambient, IDM, and skittering drill’n’bass, Whatever the Weather marks a sharp break from James’ 2021 album Reflection, a Cubist self-portrait painted in contrasting styles of experimental club music. Where that record frequently kicked against the enforced doldrums of the pandemic’s first anxious year, the new record, which she worked on in parallel in 2020, is mellower and more bucolic. And where Reflection foregrounded an array of rising vocalists and rappers, Whatever the Weather is mostly instrumental—except for a few songs featuring James’ own vocals, which were influenced by Deftones’ Chino Moreno and Mike Kinsella of Midwestern emo heroes American Football, of all people.
The project’s open-ended moniker is meant in part to reflect the fact that it may change shape in the future. “I’ve always been into improv and math rock,” she says, thinking ahead. “I don’t want to limit what I make.”
The new alias is just the latest unexpected twist in James’ remarkably dynamic career. Over the past seven years, the 26-year-old has progressed from the tentative experiments of her earliest, self-released EPs to become one of the brightest lights of London’s Hyperdub label, alongside artists like Burial and Jessy Lanza. Since her 2019 breakout LP For You and I, she has developed a recognizable style defined largely by its shapeshifting qualities—knotty electronic rhythms, contorted synths, tumultuous bursts punctuated by passages of dulcet calm. Over the past two years, fans have watched her evolve in real time on Bandcamp, where she has kept up a steady stream of loosies, outtakes, archival material, and “random” EPs.
James’ release strategy sometimes appears as unpredictable as her music: Late last fall, as Reflection began popping up in year-end list after year-end list, she offered the seven-track Wrong Name EP. Like Whatever the Weather, its songs comprise a loosely themed series: Each title—“Loraine JONes,” “LAraine James,” “Loraine JANes,” etc.—was drawn from a misspelling of her name in the press or on a club lineup. More unusual still was the digital EP’s shelflife: She posted it for sale on Bandcamp for just one week before taking it down forever. Still, in James’ mercurial world, even “forever” is a relative term. When fans started emailing her to say they had missed out on the record, she sent a bunch of them WeTransfer files of it. “I’m not going to say no if you forgot to buy it,” she says, laughing.
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Loraine James: I was finishing up Reflection and there were a couple of ideas in the album folder where I thought, This could be the start of something else. Sometimes I’ll make stuff that I think is good, but it doesn’t necessarily sound like a “Loraine James” thing, so I’ll put it aside. Some tracks on this album are five years old. I always wanted to put them in something, but they never made sense.
With the Loraine James Hyperdub material, I have more of an idea—like, IDM, club, whatever you want to call it. This project is different. A lot of the songs were audio that I played, like, improv, and chucked into this software called Slate + Ash. Then there were a couple of ambient things I’d done in 2017, very Telefon Tel Aviv-inspired. It seemed to become a thing with influences like Chino’s singing in the Deftones, or American Football—I’m a huge fan of American Football.
Yeah, I guess you wouldn’t. But I’ve always been inspired by emo. There are a couple of ideas on this album that lean more into guitar rhythms. When I was a teenager, I used to jam on the keyboards for hours, and a lot of it would be riffing on guitar melodies.
It was definitely an internet thing for me. I first heard about Bandcamp in 2012 because of this band As Tall as Lions and their side project Kilimanjaro. Through them I got into Midwest emo, math rock, all these small bands that had their stuff up on Bandcamp for free. I saw American Football at their first show back at the Electric Ballroom some years ago. I had their T-shirt, but I threw it away because it’s too small for me now.
The first time I listened to electronic music, it was through Death Cab for Cutie; they had that side project the Postal Service, and then I discovered [Postal Service producer Jimmy Tamborello’s] Dntel project and other stuff he’s done. I’d go to Last.fm to find similar artists—Telefon Tel Aviv, Aphex, Squarepusher. I had never heard music like that before. It tickles your ears. I love the unpredictableness of it. Sometimes you even get jump-scared, because it randomly pans, and you’re like, What?! And it’s constantly changing, with the smallest tweaks that you don’t notice the first time around.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess I look different from the people who make IDM; IDM is obviously a bunch of white guys, and I’m from a different time period. But I don’t really care about the term being negative or positive. I feel my music is IDM and I do my own spin on it, being inspired by other stuff and fusing it all together. I just think it’s a funny name. I mean the question of, “Well, how is it intelligent?” That’s just jokes to me.
