Herb Sundays 145: Loraine James
London's singular experimental composer with "Tunes for a Sunday x"
Herb Sundays 145: Loraine James
Playlist: Apple Music, Spotify
Art by Michael Cina. Type by Public Type.
"Tunes for a Sunday x" - Loraine James for Herb Sundays
From the bio by our friend Benoît Pioulard: “Across a remarkable run of releases in barely half a decade, London’s Loraine James has established her identity through a blend of refined composition, gritty experimentation, and unpredictable, intricate electronic programming. While titles released under her given name on the esteemed label Hyperdub tend toward IDM-influenced, vocal-heavy collaborations, James reserves her alias, Whatever The Weather, for a more impressionistic, inward gaze. On Whatever The Weather II, rich worlds of layered textures flow seamlessly from hypnotic ambience, to mottled rhythms, to cut-up collages of diaristic field recordings. The result is a uniquely fractured beauty, born from a compelling union of organic and human elements, processed through a variety of digital and analogue methods.”
For being part of the in-crowd and relating to labels like Hyperdub, AD 93, and Phantom Limb, James is remarkably unfazed by sharing potentially uncool influences, check her WIRE one-pager on Circa Survive for instance. This has made her a must for Herb Sundays for years now. I didn’t want to risk asking while we began working in a label partnership, but with the new album Whatever The Weather II debuting this past Friday, it felt like the right time to put it on the line.
As Phillipe Roberts shared for Pitchfork, “In unpacking her guiding influences, James often mentions the impact of math rock and Midwestern emo bands—particularly American Football, who she cites as a direct reference for Whatever the Weather’s vocal performances.” James has never been shy about connecting the dots between her various references, from Emo to IDM and beyond, and her playlist succinctly shows where she’s at musically.
Her new album takes a different shape for me with each listen, much like the guiding themes around the emotional inner life of the project or connected to the weather-based titling. I love that James is “Embracing the Jam” as
might say, and leaning into live takes, allowing for this project to veer into stranger waters, freeing the genres she inhabits from the self-imposed grid, it makes it more human, more fragile, and deeply powerful. My current fave cuts this week from the album are the plaintive “8°C” and the following track “26°C” whose copper hues could be pulled from the Aphex SAWII molten pit or found like seashell on an Eno-esque Sunday drizzly walk on some faraway beach of the mind, a decidedly English, cozy but uncomfortable mood. It's an instant personal classic 1-2 punch.
As a fan, I reached out back in Pandemic-era DMs after seeing her list of various acts Ghostly has represented in her list of influences, which opened up space in her mind for releasing with Ghostly. These included artists who in some way married experimental structures to popular forms including Geotic (who appears in her Herb playlist in Baths guise, via his urgent new album, gut), Telefon Tel Aviv (aka Joshua Eustis, who has mastered both WTW albums now), and Seattle’s Jeff McIlwain aka Lusine, whom Loraine sampled on her last album Gentle Confrontation (Hyperdub, 2023), on the beautiful single, “2003”:
This flow, including the inclusion of Loraine’s own voice, continues in some ways with Whatever The Weather’s II, or a blurring of the high IDM genre tradition of Loraine’s country, which just got a massive shot in the arm with global Autechre dates announced (I got my NYC tickets duh). The influence of the late label-runner Achim Szepanski (whom Sherburne wrote about upon passing last fall for his
substack) is also seemingly everywhere these days, maybe as a “twenty-year cycle” of influence from some of his most influential releases, but also as we try to find new spaces to explore musically, we turn to the realms of fusion. James has referenced “clicks and cuts stuff” as a forebear for WTWII and just as related, for her entry to Pitchfork’s “My Perfect 10” series, she chose another brilliant hybrid of the popular and the absurd, Dntel’s Life Is Full Of Possibilities (2001, Plug Research, now Sub Pop) another record that was an inspiration on the Avant-Pop ambitions of Ghostly. Dntel, aka Jimmy Tamborello (of Postal Service repute, of course), leads off this Herb playlist.
It’s hard to believe we’re over 5 years on from James’ arrival on the scene, no longer the new kid but an icon now. While she’s notoriously low-key, I think it’s fair to place her in the grand tradition of legendary experimental and electronic composers, including the UK composer Delia Derbyshire and an heir to Richard D. James, Eno, Sakamoto, etc. She is already one of the greats, with much more music ahead.
Loraine continues to stretch herself in both stranger realms as well as the more conventional forms, which makes her equally unique. As she told The Ransom Note this week:
“Whatever the Weather acts as another outlet. It’s funny when people bring up singing on a record as if it’s a controversial thing.
‘Like, oh my god, why are you singing?’
Those IDM spheres, they hate singing, like really hate singing – but i’ve always sang ever since I was a kid. I was always singing in my head or singing really loudly to Paramore or Limp Bizkit when my mum wasn’t home but I never thought I’d actually ever sing to anyone – I’m pretty shy about that kind of stuff.
Somehow it’s become more of a thing, this is it, this is where I am. I’m not a singer and I never said I was a singer. I just like to sing. I think I just became more vulnerable with my work and connected to my emotions and what’s happened, whatever, throughout my life. Sometimes I think it needs my voice.”
Bonus Beats: A Loraine James Reader
A testament to the excellent independent journalism that continues to flourish, here are three posts this week on Loraine with different lenses.
- Interviewed LJ for his excellent zensounds Substack:
Peter Kirn’s long-running CDM platform interviewed Loraine with a view of the gear as well:
PK: It feels like a set of different moods. Did you set out to make these different emotional colors, or did it evolve into this particular array?
LJ: I never know how this album, or any album, is going to shape. A lot of this was playing around with different things – half outside of Ableton, outside of the DAW. Like the Tasty Chip GR-1 [granular synthesizer] I’ve had for a couple of years – I honestly do not really know how to use it. I usually run the Novation Peak. I’ll fiddle with the knobs and straight-up record it.
New to me
’s Unknown Rhythms newsletter interviewed Loraine and delved into influence and more:LD: I’m interested in your usage of field recordings. Do you listen to a lot of field recordings in your spare time?
LJ: Yeah, yeah! All the time I forget to record stuff, which is really annoying. The one in “12°C” was something I recorded about seven years ago, when I was in Paris, and then the latest single “9°C” was when I was in Japan. I was hearing kids playing tag or something, and it was really quite sweet. These small captures of moments in life I think are important, and when I listen to other artists and hear them incorporating field recordings I think it adds a layer of warmth to it, personally.
Completely missed Loraine's involvement as Whatever The Weather, and this "WtW II" is beyond excellent.