GROWING up on the North London-Hertfordshire borders of Enfield, producer Loraine James was up on the escarpment, able to gaze down across London in the bowl of the Thames valley below.
That skyline, the city so near, silhouetted, morphing as new towers grew from reinforced steel skeletons, informed and continues to inform her enthralling future beats; skittering, chopping, intelligent, merging jazz, grime, footwork, electronica, drill, Warp tradition into new shapes and torsions, ripe with possibility. Stripped back, austere, Ballardian, it’s right at the cutting edge.
All of which descriptive preamble entirely applies to her latest single drop, the staccato groove of “Let’s Go”, on which she declaims a simple, disassociated mantra as a hook: “I like the simple stuff, we like the simple things / What does that bring?”; a complex question gliding in on the back of a wholly modernist cityscape music.
Take a listen, below, and get your Paypal window open for the soon-coming album from which “Let’s Go” is taken: it’s entitled Reflection and it’s out on June 4th on Hyperdub digitally and on limited purple vinyl.
Reflection is diaristic, autobiographical, political, and by turns admits and conveys inner turbulence, honesty, empathy and bittersweet hope, recounting how the viral year felt for a young, black queer woman.
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