April 8, 2022 - Ghostly International
London producer Loraine James’ new project Whatever the Weather is an ambient collection of improvised electronic sound sculptures filled with surprising disarming moments—musical stream-of-consciousness from a fascinating mind. There are hardly any lyrics on the album, and each song is named for a specific temperature centigrade, further keeping us tightly locked out of the one-dimensional interpretations words can often give us when we listen to musical works. Instead, armed with only one measurement of the weather forecasts ahead, we are forced to observe and fill in the blanks. We ruminate with James on the space in and around rhythmic patterns, which often feel on the edge of falling apart, on the edge of chaos in a universe of a soft, reflective voice. But despite heavy experimentation and boundless curiosity, James never loses sight of the horizon. She instead shows us how far ahead of our ears she can hear by drawing connections that I can’t fathom until she shows them to me.
With glassy synths, pillowy textures, and echoes of trip-hop beats and jazz lifts, sounds bubble, trickle, normalize, interrupt, and at times build icy tension that makes you catch your breath in sharp wonder. And unlike a lot of linguistic convention used to connect temperature rhetoric with sound, the concept of cold on this album has much higher energy than heat. Highlights include: ‘14°C’ in which you are a stained glass window and sunlight is piercing through you, activating all your protons; ‘17°C’ in which you are walking quickly through something busy that you find both invigorating and terrifying; and ‘0°C’ in which your heart is beating from exertion, feeling the sharpness, the energy stemmed from knowing you are alive and close to the edge of your wellbeing. In Whatever the Weather, James shows us freedom, vulnerability, and light as a musician, a fearless exploration. We are reminded that something unexpected, surprising, and made with wild abandon can be far more precious than another pop song punched out of a template. ☔