Herb Sundays 100: Jam City
The prolific producer for himself and others (Olivia Rodrigo, Troye Sivan) shares a rainy Sunday reverie.
Herb Sundays 100: Jam City (Apple, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon).
Art by Michael Cina
Author’s note: Continuing with a fave musician (Jam City) who has a great 2023 album, which if I had to choose outside of Ghostly terrain, would be my favorite album of the year (I’ll never use “best” for music, cause that doesn’t make sense).
In other news:
went wild and did a round-up of the first 100 Herb posts including unused and draft art, etc. Go see it.
I like working with Mike but I also am willing to share, so you should hit him up for projects that you want great design for or even just a painting or a print a a gift, etc.
Back to herbing….
Herb City 100: Jam City
"A collection of tracks to listen to on a rainy Sunday. I tried to pick stuff that fits the mood of a peaceful Sunday morning, but also the looming storm clouds of dread that Monday is just around the corner. I've spent alot of recent Sunday's travelling back from shows so this mix definitely works well for staring out of plane or train windows, feeling wistful and defiant (Eagles - Find A Love Again), reflective (Randy Crawford - Rainy Night In Georgia, Genesis - In Too Deep) or just pleasantly tired and vibed out (Cruza - Hypnotherapy). Had a hard time making the case that any of these were guilty pleasures, but settled on closing out with the The Stones, because this song just makes me well up inside." - Jam City
Jam City, the chosen name for producer and musician Jack Latham, has defined a decade+ career centered around his four well-designed albums and copious singles. and remixes. In parallel, he has forged an impressive career as a producer starting with Kelela’s Cut 4 Me mixtape in 2013, and going on to executive produce her debut album Take Me Apart (Warp, 2017) as well as working with Australian megastar Troye Sivan (“The Good Side”, “Animal”) and more recently co-producing “Heather” by Conan Gray and “Jealousy Jealousy” on 2021’s SOUR album by Olivia Rodrigo. Other production credits include Joji, Lil Yachty, Bad Gyal, MØ, Mallrat, Allie X, Killy, Deb Never, Perfume Genius and David Byrne.
In 2023 Jam City returned with a new album, Jam City Presents EFM claiming he “was itching to make a club album for a while but had to wait til the moment was right” which is maybe even the album I enjoyed the most record this year. It gets the good Pop veins poppin’ but leaves no filmy aftertaste.
In short it’s a throwback to a feeling of Latham’s or “that feeling of cramming into your friends car on a Saturday night in the dead of winter, the leather seats cold against your skin. Speeding towards a city (speeding away from somewhere), flashes of warmth shoot up your spine and into your chest, and your favorite song comes on the stereo...”
Similarly, if you forced me to pick a favorite song of 2023, I would probably default to “Times Square” which has an almost unfinished quality but when the big pads hit at the end, it finds resolution. The album gives me glimpses of fellow maximalists Basement Jaxx, moments of it like a slowed version of “Rendez Vu” which for the first time in 20 years sounds like it’s not set too fast. The machine gun breaks of “LLTB” are pure heat. The list goes on.
The return of smoother brain sounds including Trance and Trip-Hop made me very happy, possibly because I got to experience them in their heyday, but I think that I admire some of these more melodic and full-bodied forms as they carry a sense of physicality with real songcraft grafted to it. Maybe every 10 or 20 years you need to go back to the source for a drink. The po-faced Techno scene needed it.
A Primer’s Guide To Jam City
Latham moves so vastly between records it potentially limits his ability to speak to his original underground base who crave consistency but for us dabblers, it’s heaven. In many ways Latham’s vision predicted the sound and vision for a new wave of young pop stars with highly art directed records that traffic in the personal but are fleshed out with a new cast of characters each time, as if trying on a different coat of colors.
There’s a strong conceptual bent to all his four albums so its easy to discuss:
Classical Curves (2012)
A record that rightfully deserves it’s classic status and has a reissue bio that isn’t afraid to say as much:
“Jam City’s debut album Classical Curves is a landmark in the history of UK-club music. Released in the summer of 2012, it blazed a trail through the tangled aftermath of the late 2000s DJ-renaissance. Not purely a dance album nor overly cerebral, it offered something fresh. Menacing and playful, sensual and razor-sharp, the 10 tracks moved listeners in a bodily way that defied words. It soon became clear that Jam City had done something spectacular; the artist invented a genre.
“Deconstructed Club”—the term eventually used to describe the sonic aesthetic of Classical Curves—doesn’t quite capture the record’s impact….The record also inspired a generation of aspiring producers to experiment with unconventional sound-design, providing them with an imaginative template to adapt and make their own.”
Mike Powell’s Pitchfork review sums it up nicely:
“Some electronic musicians strive to make their sound as humanistic as possible; Classical Curves is basically disinfectant set to a beat. It borrows its jazz chords from artists like Prince and the 1980s electro-soul group Zapp-- artists who found glamor in the cleanliness of machines. It's an album of bangers, though less in the vernacular sense than in the sense that it often sounds like stuff banging together.”
I asked friend-of-the-Stack Raihan Anwar of FWB and unknownvariable (who got a great write up by
recently) about the impact of CC:“During my time at Fade to Mind, we definitely saw the parallel strands of vaporwave, deconstructed club and cloud rap all coalesce into something more—broken glass snares, memes and all. Classical Curves was an “a-ha” moment as it pushed the tangible divides of the dubstep/post-dubstep world into strictly digital, yet malleable, realms. If we take the early 10s as the “death of regionality,” in favor of internet, monoculture etc, Classical Curves was part of the soundtrack to that. I don’t think it’s a mistake that CC, along with Rustie’s Glass Swords, and James Ferraro’s work have come back—with some added lyrical structure—to become the genre presently known as hyperpop :)”
The sleeve of Classical Curves is almost its own topic. Let’s go back to Powell’s review:
“As with all Night Slugs' best releases, Classical Curves creates a world that belongs to the music-- a visual world, a world of ideas. The album's cover is a slick little motorbike lying on its side in a marble atrium in front of a huge fern, with a silky yellow piece of fabric draped over a wall behind the bike. It's a seductive image, an image of perfect objects in an imperfect, disarrayed scene. During a recent email exchange, Latham didn't share with me exactly where the shot-- or some accompanying videos-- were taken, but he mentioned that a year ago he worked for a company "stealing and selling information about their rivals," a job that forced him to spend a lot of time hanging out in similar kinds of lobbies, spaces he calls "glamorous looking in a kind of... corporate, rich-people way, I suppose...
Early Jam sounds, to me, sound like a shy guy putting up some tuff exterior with some feeling seeping through. It’s this tension that gives it character, on some “so stiff its funky” continuum:
“Between every beat, the space is so absolute and empty that getting to the next piece of solid ground is a kind of perpetual thrill. Not a warm one, not a nice one, just a perpetual one, one that mechanically follows the one before it, no variation, no room for error.”
Indeed “Hyatt Park Nights, Pt. 1” sounds like a nerd in his basement, rigging his MPC full of zonk’d soul samples up to a Rock-afire Explosion robot band, grinning manically as the goofy dog soaks the cymbal and the Cerwin Vega subs fire. Mom yells from upstairs “turn that nose down!”
Dream A Garden (2015)
2015’s Dream A Garden was the sobering wakeup from the Curves fantasy nightmare, supposedly inspired by the 2011 English riots or as
said: “Where Classical Curves was slick and brittle, equal parts techno and grime, Dream a Garden is sticky and humid; where Classical Curves seemed streaked with graphite, Dream a Garden buckles like moldy carpet…. The guitars—notes bent, signal clean—often evoke funk, or at least an idea of it. In "Proud", the wah-wah hints at Hot Buttered Soul; in "The Garden Thrives", the tone and strumming style recalls Prince's "Sexy Dancer".With Dream, Jam City also enters into the league of British visual/conceptual artists like Herb 36 Jeremy Deller or Herb 48 Mark Leckey, in representing both tension and beauty in a near-recent UK. Indeed, in the mid ’10s Latham even got wrapped in the cloth of Conceptronica conception from
(Herb 32), a maligned but not-wrong title:“Dream a Garden featured for the first time his fragile vocals singing politically-conscious lyrics that blended rage and sorrow. The video for the single “Unhappy” consisted of a montage of shopping malls, armed police, advertisement hoardings, drone strikes seen from above, and gaunt models taking selfies against a backdrop of urban decay… In interviews, Latham spoke of how the power structure wanted people to be miserable and isolated, atomized individuals competing for scraps left by the plutocracy and drugging themselves with narcotic entertainments. Reflecting this state of affairs, even dissecting it, wasn’t enough: Dream a Garden was a paean to the power of collectively envisioning a better life.”
Pillowland (2020)
Pillowland (artwork: Jakob Haglof, photography: Sylwia Wozniak) was the hard won return record after a “tumultuous 5-year absence” and released into pandemic purgatory. The term Bedroom Pop is used a lot to reference something more banal, but this actually hits the mark on what that descriptor should mean. In revisiting Jam’s catalog, this album which “drowns in sounds somewhere between 1972 and 2020” has grown on me the most. “Cartwheel” and “They Eat The Young” sound like hits in Hell.
If Dream A Garden was “another world is possible” Pillowland is the surrender inwards after failing to find it. The Adam Curtis on his shoulder has won and we’re gonna seek pleasure now.”Written under the influence of living in America, Pillowland lounges spreadeagle between the plaintive, bit-crushed psychedelia of Dream A Garden, and the bass-heavy, slow motion productions of the beloved Earthly mixtapes, bringing you 10 scorch’d, carnival-esque hallucinations of Pop-Rock Fantasy…It explores those starry fantasies which are promised but never fulfilled; the glistening, celluloid fantasies of a life filled with glamour, meaning and purpose that hover permanently on our ever-shrinking horizon.”
In true auteur fashion, the bio includes a callback to the air conditioned atrium of Classical Curves’s cover but now seen as a ruined Arcadia. The “Don’t Dream It’s Over” aura consumes us:
”Back in the smoggy metropolis, far from Pillowlands golden gates, the spectral post-2008 shopping center that haunted Classical Curves makes its return:“ I was back in my old haunt, escaping an unseasonably hot day in there, and I passed an old man wearing a Brian Jones T-shirt and looked sad. Over the tannoy Chicago’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ echo’d and it moved me close to tears. I had never heard a dream so convincing, and so out of reach”.
<pause for proudcer era>
The Pillowland era seems to begat his imperial producer phase. In his Red Bull Music Academy interview (see bottom) with the great Lauren Martin he shares his encyclopedic American pop knowledge which explains a lot. Eric Torres asked him about it for Pitchfork in 2021:
ET: Do you still get nervous sharing new ideas and music with people in the studio, or has that lessened over time?
JL: It’s gotten much better over the years. The first time I went to the States and got involved in that whole writing world, [I found] you have to develop a thick skin pretty quickly. But you also have to be sensitive and have your guard down anyway, because the other person in the room is vulnerable, too. I’m still looking for real, honest criticism in the people that I trust. Once I have that, I know that things are moving in a good place or going wherever they need to.
ET: Did you draw on any specific influences while working on SOUR?
JL: I was listening to a lot of the Shangri-Las and other girl groups. Not that Olivia’s music sounds like that at all, but they were from an era of pop music when every production choice was tailor-made to the narrative of the song and the songwriting. There’s sort of a psychodrama going on with the way the vocals are arranged. That’s something that over the years has fallen out of favor, but that inspired me when listening to the Olivia stuff because it was telling a story. Everything that comes in has to be on cue to embellish her words and further the narrative of the song—anything more than that and you’re distracting, and anything less and you’re not doing justice to the incredible songwriting. I think about that more and more, how production is not just a case of musical problem solving or EQ or compression or taking parts out, but it’s a filmic thing. You’re soundtracking their voice and their narrative and aiding that. I feel like production should be invisible sometimes and you shouldn’t notice it in that sense, because you’re just carried by the music itself.
Jam City Presents EFM (2023)
(Cover Art: Lisa Signorini @lilisignorini Design: Nicholas D'apolito @nick.dap Jackson Green @jdg.94)
But out of this sadness, we come back to the source. …EFM is another concept of sorts, a radio station, or a feeling. The release notes state: “Standing for Electric Flight Music, Every Freak Moves, Endless Fantasy Mode, Everyone Feels Magnetic and so much more, EFM represents the cacophony of emotions felt within formative club experiences.”
I had a similar response to the album as Chris at Gorilla Vs Bear who placed this high in his best albums of the year list: “The album of summer '23 for me. With assists from esteemed guests Wet, Empress Of, the dude from Show Me the Body, and others, Jam City hooks up an exhilarating set of shimmering, widescreen dance-pop bangers that feel equally suited for the club and late night drives through the city.”
Speaking about the album, Jam City said: “When I first started writing this record, in my head, I was 18, back in the Liquid & Envy in my hometown of Redhill on a Saturday Night. Fuck London, I’d only been a few times for school trips anyway. This was where it was at. Walking through the doors to Photek’s ‘Mine to Give’, it felt like you’d walked into Studio 54 or something. There’s a mural of the Manhattan skyline preposterously splashed over the bar, neon everywhere and the floors are sticky with cheap champagne. Shivering in the rain soaked car park, a group of girls from my school share a lighter with the local bikers in their leathers; Harley, Honda, Yamaha…”
It’s funny he mentioned Photek, who I was thinking of while driving around to ..EFM (naturally), and is actually a keen forebear of Jam’s sound. That air-cushioned monorail of sound, flawless, maybe a little stiff, but ecstatic nonetheless, containing a stoic gaze of utter conviction, of steely hermetic beauty.
…EFM is bold and beautiful indeed and maybe even a little Conceptronica, wide-eyed but not dumbdumb, focused but not dorky. The Resident Advisor review captured it best for me:
“EFM plays like a club record for the uninitiated, for those outside of the major urban centres where club culture "happens." But Latham makes the case that those aren't the only places worth paying attention to—sometimes all it takes is like-minded friends that get together to revel in their own version of the perfect night out…Through these brief scenes, Latham plugs into a collective history, one of hometown boredom and amorphous suburban landscapes. These events could have happened anywhere and to anyone.”
This is the vision that Latham has always reached for, even back in 2013 when he told RA about his podcast mix, and has finally achieved.
RA: Can you tell us about the idea behind the mix?
JC: It's just about having fun and dancing with your friends; that's all it's ever about, moving your ass and letting your mind wander. Stretching out.
So was it a good year for dance music? I have no idea. But albums like …EFM affirm my worship. Music for the moment, as important as the day you were born.
Love Jam City!!! To anybody that makes it to the comments i'd like to give a mention to a track called Magic Drops, a tune on one of Jams earliest releases on Night Slugs. It felt like an earthshattering moment in club music when it dropped at least to me and my crew. We still talk about much fun it was/is to drop into sets. Sounded like the floor had fallen from under your feet. So good.
Forgive me if I misremember something here, but I asked Bok Bok about the Classical Curves album cover - specifically, what was the story behind it. I asked because it was my favorite album cover. He lit up because it was his favorite too, and because he art directed it and was proud of it.
As I remember him explaining, there was in fact a backstory to the mise en scene, something I think he implied was personal to either himself or Latham and that he didn't want to divulge at the time.
But he did tell me that the original intent was to shoot it on location. Perhaps fortunately, the location they had in mind was closed permanently shortly before they were scheduled to shoot there, forcing them to re-create the scene digitally, a process that resulted in the uncanny look of the image (key to its success, IMO), and one they then used for later Night Slugs jackets like Bok Bok's own Your Charizmatic Self.