10. Loraine JamesBuilding Something Beautiful For Me
Loraine James is one of the most exciting musicians working at the moment and she blows my mind with the speed at which she works. She does lots of these different collaborations with people and seems so adaptable. I saw her play with the London Symphony Orchestra down in the Barbican last year and it’s amazing how she adapts to these things and again, her music is a bit like Andy Stott, in that it sounds very chaotic and sometimes it’s falling apart, like she’s losing control, but she’s clearly not. She’s very clever with things she does, and it’s done in quite a minimal way.
What she did with the Julius Eastman stuff I thought was really clever [the album is a response to the work of the late NYC composer]. You could listen to her record and not really know that it was anything to do with Julius Eastman until you listen to his records and then go back to it. I think it’s a really lovely way of taking somebody’s music you’ve discovered and really going into it and paying homage to it without doing cover versions. I’m not sure I can think of many examples of someone doing something similar to this. Rather than her playing his records it was more like her showing you how he had affected her soul. It came from within her and then it led me back to him. I didn’t really know his music at all until I heard this album. She’s like James Holden, every time she brings something out, it blows my mind because you don’t think there’s anywhere left for them to go, but there are new ideas out there. Obviously, I’m not a musician so I hadn’t thought of them, but she seems to come across them with ease.
