James Blake: Music As Pure Sensation
James Blake, cover art for his Before EP 2020
I first stumbled upon James Blake entirely by accident at the New York Governor’s Ball Festival in 2018. It was pre-pandemic, and thousands of us were jumbled together on Randall’s Island one warm June evening, twelve dollar beers in-hand while rushing from one stage to another in time to see the next set. Misreading the lineup, my friend dragged us over to listen to “James Bay” just as the artist was about to start, marching us through a relatively empty field until we were practically touching the stage. A crowd steadily gathered behind as the sun went down, thousands of people crammed together in short time, chattering excitedly about a mysterious James Blake.
There was some fumbling with a microphone and three guys assembled on stage, one stationed at an analog synth fully equipped with all its wires, another center on the drums, and a third who sat on a tiny stool in front of his keyboard and tables, unsuspectingly normal-looking. My friend realized his mix-up as the music began. The girl with us was not quite coherent, her head hanging from the weed and MD she took earlier, and they eventually decided their time was better spent in search of a bathroom. I could feel the drawn-out bass vibrating through the packed dirt below our feet as they left, my body already tingling with anticipation. I stayed in place.
Three people in their late twenties stood next to me, swigging from cans and excitedly gushing about the artist.
“Is he good?” I asked.
“Oh my god!” One girl exclaimed. “He’s incredible. This is my third time seeing him.”
“Just wait for the bass to drop,” another shouted at me, beaming. “You are going to lose your fucking mind!”
The first five keys of Life Round Here began playing and the stage was enveloped in deep blue light, beams swinging over the audience as we stared up towards the band. Swallowed in a crowd of strangers on my own on that strange metropolitan island, I felt the least alone that I ever have. The group around me smiled from beneath cowboy hats, glittered faces, and crop tops – my comrades in the festival. The air buzzed with energy and serotonin.
Blake’s melodic vocals echoed through the night air from deafening speakers all around us; soft keys, synth, and drums changing with the light show and lulling us into a wavy trance as we swayed and danced together. It was music like I had never heard before. He sounded almost surreal, his voice melding with the vibrations and compelling us to move our bodies in Woodstock-esque hippie contortions, fluid and eager to hear what came next. Heads nodded along as if he were sharing an intimate story only for our ears, and something you could only understand if you were there in that exact moment.
When the music amped up, it amped slowly, taking minutes until it edged into a full-on blast of acid, house, and techno mixed together with smashing drums and pounding bass. It felt like the blood in your veins was pumping specifically because Blake told it to. It was the sort of feeling you get during live music where you are transported entirely to another realm and don’t want to come back to reality; you just hope to fill your life with more moments like that – the music deep in your bones, your nervous system transmitting pure dopamine.
The first half hour of the set was soft, muted. Through drawn-out falsetto and strings of melancholic lyrics, Blake murmured to us about his sadness, loneliness, and heartbreak. It was the discography that he became well known for. But when he hit the first two notes of Limit to Your Love on his keyboard, the crowd changed instantly. “There’s a limit to your love…” he sung out, fans going wild, “...like a waterfall in slow motion.” He reached the hook and it seemed like the song dropped out from under us entirely, thousands of strangers joined in this sensation of freefall, exhilarated and surprised and encompassed by his music as we just… felt. No other thoughts in our minds.
Blake is king of the slow build, using repetitive echoes of his own voice, rhythmic beats, and dramatic synth as a backdrop to more and more added elements, the audience cheering each time, until the tension buildup is almost too much, and the crescendo crashes down upon us like a wave. The trio pulled their energy back to focus on Blake’s angelic vocals every so often, but there were no rules after the first half-hour, plunging the crowd into euphoric rave, song after song, as the band went crazy on drums and synth. Light beams changed with the set from aqua to green, golden, and blood red at the music’s most extreme, flashing around the stage and the audience so we could only see silhouettes of the three figures in front of us. Blake became a simple black outline, the vision of a conductor against bright, symphonic chaos.
James Blake performing at Governor’s Ball festival in New York, 2018
Frisson is the best word to describe James Blake’s music – especially live. French for “shiver,” frisson is also known as aesthetic or musical chills, some even call it a “skin orgasm.” It’s the sensation of tingling, goosebumps, pupil dilation, and feelings of pleasure which often occur in a psychophysiological response to music which violates some level of musical expectation. It sometimes translates to shivers down the spine, and can apparently be enhanced by volume or cold temperatures. Environment, social context, and emotional contagion are also important factors in producing frisson. That is to say, blasting unexpected and sonically interesting music at thousands of excitable people on a cool evening is the perfect context to create these waves of tingles down your back, hairs standing up on your arms, and sudden excitement or thrill visible in your dilated eyes.
With his new EP, Before, which was released this October, Blake returns to his roots in club music and backbeats, putting a new spin on his sound by de-compartmentalizing James Blake the singer and James Blake the DJ.
““I found a balance on this EP where I could sing, being myself, over hype dance music. ‘I Keep Calling’ is probably one of the most uptempo things I’ve ever done. It’s a style of euphoric dance music that I’ve never been able to apply to my own voice. I was just so happy when it all came together. The same with ‘Before.’ That kind of euphoria towards the end, I’ve never done anything like””
The son of James Litherland (a founding member of the rock band Coliseum), James Blake grew up surrounded by music. Classically trained on the piano but influenced by dance sounds and artists such as Kanye West and Bon Iver, he originally got into electronics through dubstep, flying under the radar for much of his early career. In recent years, though, Blake has collaborated with some of the biggest names in the music industry, like Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, Travis Scott, Chance the Rapper, André 3000, and Rosalia – to name a few. He is still shy about his vocals, noting how some singers can break into song in any room, but “I can’t really do that.” Ironically, his music resonates largely because of this layer of emotional vulnerability which he sheds in his tracks.
Blake mentions an article to a French interviewer for Couleur3 in 2019 about how singing in falsetto is supposedly a marker of disembodiment and uncomfortability with your real self, commenting that he understands that, because when he sings in falsetto there is “a comfortable disconnect.” Blake adds, “It’s kind of like I’m not necessarily in my body.”
This otherworldly, out-of-body experience characterizes most of Blake’s music, for singer and audience alike. It is rare to find a musician so able to experiment and produce with so many different elements at a quality like Blake’s. His new EP is work that originalist fans and modernists might finally be able to agree on: it takes the best of his old sound, but without the same depression, adding his signature vocals on top of it all in a combination that conquers what Blake has previously called his “musical A.D.D.” Lending a sense of emotional distraction and oratory magic to his fans with Before, it seems that during lockdown, James Blake has finally unearthed the uniformity he was searching for in his sound.
For the best of live James Blake at home, check this out before you go:
Emma Hemingway is a fourth year student at the University of Edinburgh studying International Relations. She is the founder, web designer, and Editor-in-Chief of Ensemble Magazine.