I recall a good few months ago when an eager James Blake sent me a couple of tracks through dubstepforum for a listen. Both were beautiful chilled pieces of piano work with some finely tuned sub beneath, and Blake’s talent was instantly recogniseable. It would seem now that he’s very capable of producing a vareity of sounds, from that stripped back piano work, through fuller sounding wonky to the reaches of some excellent vocal pieces. Hemlock have first dibs on his stuff this time however!
The London based label’s new release now finds James pushing out one of the first tracks he created (although not one he had sent me previously). In his own words “Air and Lack Thereof is actually the first tune I ever wrote, and it took me a year to work out how I wanted to approach it, but I think the waiting paid off. ” I’ll say. You’ll most likely recognise the track since it’s been getting some heavy support from plenty DJs, both radio and live. I’ve got very little to say about it short of this: You cannot afford to miss this when it’s released.
On the flipside to JB’s curiously named pseudo-wonky dubstep affair you’ll find ‘Sparing The Horses’ which, considering how quickly it was written, is a track with some serious growing ability. Again, James comments “I finished [Sparing The Horses] in about a week. I knew how I wanted to approach it, but I wanted to push the sound into new territories.” And i’d say he’s done just that.
So it would seem that James is doing rather well. An ace release on Hemlock, following an excellent mix on the truly excellent “Electronic Explorations” podcast last week, and I’m almost certain we’ll be seeing and hearing more from this meistro before the year is over.
