Hi. I am James Blake.That’s right.
James.Bl.
Bl.Blaaaa.…aaaaaake’s the name, lengthy, inconveniently positioned silences is the game. And what a fun game it is – after all, everybody loves getting Jamie Lidell round theirs to do the hoovering on a Saturday night and then making him croon while he absorbs a volley of sporadic taser blasts to his diaphragm, right? I first became inspired to make music after learning to speak French on an audio cassette. They’d be all like: ‘Ecoutez et repetez.’ Then they’d say a phrase. And there’d be like a three second gap. And so I thought: wouldn’t it be great to make a whole album like this, with massive gaps between all the phrases? I guess what I’m really saying is that when you listen to my eponymous debut album, you’re learning how to speak the language of me.If you’re going to question whether this is in fact a ‘pleasant’ listening experience, just remember the old saw about how music’s not about the notes, man, it’s about the gaps in-between. You’ve heard that line before? Like, ten times? In the last ten reviews of my record and in all the broadsheets when The xx won last year’s Mercury Prize, and then before that, just after Gordon Smart got properly into Burial? Well sorry guy, I guess it’s just not easy for outsiders to develop a unique critique of a guy who the masses have come to know as the blurred-out, emotionally ambiguous (blank) face of (post-)dubstep.I mean, it’s a weird mantle to hang on me in the first instance, cos I’d always been lead to believe that dubstep required beats – it’s in the name, right? Dubstep: in that the step of the dance you’re doing should correspond with some kind of identifiable rhythm. But my music doesn’t have any beats. It doesn’t have any rhythm. If people went out to the club and tried to dance to my music, every trip to the bar would take three hours. I can only think that the police intervened in this year’s BBC Sound of 2011 Poll and awarded second prize to me in an attempt to curb violence among the drunk. Only the second hottest sound of 2011? Seriously?! When exactly has “My brother and my sister don’t speak to me. But I don’t blame them” repeated over and over for four minutes in a frosty monotone while beats disperse into translucent fractals been anything other than THE sound of any year? I make Four Tet look like Basshunter, FFS.I know, y’all heard Fearne Cotton fapping herself to death live on air over the Feist cover and thought (as Geoff Barrow himself tweeted): ‘Great. We’re entering Dubstep: The Pub Singer Years’. You naively suspected that maybe I was the result of some experiment to carve Adele and The xx into a massive coffee table of hope. But the truth is I can’t write songs like that. If I could, do you think I’d have needed to left-right pan each alternate second of “The Wilhelm Scream” (which my dad wrote)? Do you think I’d need to spend half my waking life communicating with people through a vocoder? Of course not. I’d just write songs.Right. E. Nough. Off down Tesco’s to get some.F.Airy.Liq…AS RELAYED TO GAVIN HAYNES
James.Bl.
Bl.Blaaaa.…aaaaaake’s the name, lengthy, inconveniently positioned silences is the game. And what a fun game it is – after all, everybody loves getting Jamie Lidell round theirs to do the hoovering on a Saturday night and then making him croon while he absorbs a volley of sporadic taser blasts to his diaphragm, right? I first became inspired to make music after learning to speak French on an audio cassette. They’d be all like: ‘Ecoutez et repetez.’ Then they’d say a phrase. And there’d be like a three second gap. And so I thought: wouldn’t it be great to make a whole album like this, with massive gaps between all the phrases? I guess what I’m really saying is that when you listen to my eponymous debut album, you’re learning how to speak the language of me.
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