TAS In Session: James Blake

James Blake's unusual permutations of electronica, pop and dubstep has swiftly elevated the 22-year-old British producer's first album, which dropped earlier this year, as one of the most important debuts of 2011.

His ambient and almost unsettling cover of Leslie Feist's "Limit To Your Life" or his own eerily distorted "Unluck," might not be easy mainstream fare, but Blake's managed to sell out most venues on his US and UK tours, inspiring discussions, even controversy, about his soulful, piano-driven deconstruction of dubstep.

Blake, who plays New York's Webster Hall this Wednesday, July 13 and Chicago's Pitchfork Music Festival this weekend, recently visited The Alternate Side with his bandmates to play several songs from his self-titled debut, including "The Wilhelm Scream" and "Unluck:"

Russ Borris: How has you latest trip to the States been so far?

James Blake: It’s been pretty overwhelming, like the first one. It gets better and better.

Russ: What’s the biggest difference in playing for the US crowds as opposed to home in the UK?

James: I think there’s a common musical background in some ways because I grew up with a lot of American music. I think I can tell from certain moments in songs that people react to in certain ways that I kind of want them to. It doesn’t always happen in the UK and Europe. It sometimes does. I think the American crowds seem to be really up for it, for whatever song we’re playing.

Russ: Are you finding recognition for the songs in the first note.

James: Yeah, that’s such a nice feeling. It gives you something to run with for the rest of the song when people hear it, know it and cheer.

Russ: You’re coming to the US, you have this record which has had so much hype and attention. Is there a pressure thing when you’re playing in front of crowds? Do you have to live up to what they expect of you?

James: I don’t really think so. The hype is kind of internet based, really. Word of mouth seems to get the message across even better, more heathily in a way. People go, they were good or bad live. There’s hype and then there’s internet hype. Both have done really good things for me and I can’t complain. I kind of ignore all of that and just focus on playing live.

Russ: You do your own thing.

James: Yeah, in the same way that football in the UK and Europe. When you see an interview with a footballer after a game. They always say, I keep my head down and let my feet do the talking. I think that really carries over to music as well. There’s no amount of outside influence that should stop you from doing what you want to do.

Russ: I think there’s that hype because the music you’ve been creating is pretty unique in a time when it’s hard to come up with something original. You’re twisting in influences in a whole new way, whether that’s R&B or dubstep. You’re creating something fresh. Where does that come from for you?

James: I don’t think it’s that hard to make things that sound new. I just think not a lot of people bother doing it and not a lot of people want to do it. I don’t think anyone should want to do it. It’s kind of not necessary, trying to think of new sounds. Or trying to come up with new ways of producing stuff. I don’t think that’s the future or necesssary or the endgame. I don’t think that’s the goal. That’s shouldn’t have to be the goal; it just happens to be something that I enjoy, fiddling around in the dark and experimenting with things I haven’t heard before. It’s an approach. And it’s ended me up in a really good place because it means that I can keep doing that and people have given me the confidence to keep doing it. There’s plenty of people who make music that’s incredibly sonic and interesting who won’t make it onto the radio or into people’s living rooms. The only difference there is if you put a vocal in something, and you play an instrument, then it gives people an inroad into those sounds.

Russ: You talk of vocals and instruments and you’ve found the way of marrying the two and making your voice almost an instrument in the recordings. Were you just stumbling upon that or was it always the goal?

James: When I was doing the first couple of dubstep 12-inches, released in that scene, a thousand copies or whatever - those tunes were sampling other things. I think I was just working out a way, subconsciously, to arrive at a place where I could produce my own voice. That went through different manifestations. Sampling myself from dictophones, playing piano and singing. Inseparable recordings of piano and voice where they’re inextricably linked, you can’t separate the two. Maybe me singing a song and then sampling the whole thing. At the same time I was learning to record myself and that whole sound and production style gave me a vehicle or vessel for singing.

Russ: You’ve got two keyboards here. How does that work when you do music live?

James: On “Limit” I’d play the piano part and the piano, but to harmonize with myself I use a kind of vocoder. I’m actually playing with my fingers, but it will be a third lower. So I’ll be playing the bottom harmony with my left hand and controlling it ….

Russ: Is that like autotune?

James: No, vocoder is essentially sending a signal of your voice through a synth or vice versa. I’m not actually quite sure how scientifically that works, but I think that’s essentially it. It mixes the signal of your voice and a synth. So what comes out is a synth-sounding voice with sibilance, vowels and consonants.

Russ: It’s amazing that this kind of music, something that could be kind of artificial, depending on whose hands it’s in, [is very warm] in the way that you do it. How do you balance that?

James: With technology or computers, they do what you tell them to do. If you decide that you want to overuse them, it’s very easy to do that. Early on [we decided] that there was no way we’d have laptops on stage. You can’t see anything behind it, they generate distrust in the audience, they make people think, “What’s going on? He’s not playing.” So we thought, we’re not going to that. All the things I actually do use are all hardware. It’s a minimal setup on stage anyway; there’s not a multitude of stuff going on. It’s essentially like a band; I’m playing keyboard, I’m singing, we’ve got a drummer who’s playing drums essentially and we’ve got a guitarist who is playing guitar and sampler. I think the reason it sounds, hopefully, natural is that it feels natural to us. We’re three people who played together before in bands that weren’t electronic and wasn’t even my material and now we’re playing this stuff. It feel right.

Russ: I caught two shows that you did at SXSW at Stubbs and an old church. One of the things I thought was so cool is the curiousity of the audience of what it would sound like loud. The thing I couldn’t get past is that we were at Stubbs, an outdoor venue, and there’s this wall of sound that bouncing off places and the reverb is actually shooting through you standing there. But there’s no walls. It was incredible to watch.

James: That’s really cool. I especially like what you said about the reverb. In a place like that the natural reverb isn’t very prominant. It was quite a strange setting to have. I suppose we generate our own sound when there isn’t one already. When we go somewhere like a church, we played a big church in Austria recently, and that was pretty amazing. We didn’t need any reverbs or delays because the place was so big and cavernous. The sound engineer just used what was already there. Which is nice because in something like “The Wilhelm Scream,” they’ve got those cavernous reverbs on the track, but we didn’t need them.

Russ: Where did the idea of “The Wilhelm Scream” come from?

James: “The Wilhelm Scream” is a song ["Where To Turn"] that was written by my dad [James Litherland] and sung and produced by my dad. It was essentially his song, a cover. An interpolation. I’ve taken parts of it. I sang it because I grew up with it. That song is deep within my psyche, ingrained in me from an early age. I listened to it a lot when I was younger, it was always in the house. When I started to produce, I was sitting one day and thought, why don’t I just sing it? Try to do a version of it?

Russ: The track that got me into your album was “The Wilhelm Scream.” I thought that you didn’t sound like anyone else. In a time where there’s so much noise, your record is the opposite of that. It’s not necessarily quiet, because there’s so many sounds and textures, but was it a goal to put yourself in a space that brings people to a softer place?

James: I don’t think it was conscious. It might have been subconscious. If you turn on the TV and the radio, to an extent, especially where I live, there’s a relentlessness. It wasn’t a statement, though. I do beileve that it’s busy and chaotic, TV and radio in England and I’d imagine here as well. That’s mainstream. But it’s not why my sound is the way it is. I’m not even sure I have a sound. I know people say I have, but I keep moving on. The more people talk about silence, the more I make noisy records. I’m aware that if you coin something too much, you become a cliche of yourself and I don’t intend to do just one thing. I did intend for it to have that vibe, but it wasn’t intentionally minimal. The strange thing for me is that a lot of people thing that these things are minimal and possibly unfinished songs. Like maybe “I Never Learnt To Share” was a kind of mantra, repeated over and over again.

Russ: I think it’s the beauty of that one. How you were able to take one line and stretch that out over three or four minutes. Very impressive.

James: It was an exercise in that technique, but to me it sounded like a song. I didn’t think that I was repeating a vocal over and over again and would it be annoying? It can be and I’m sure to a lot of people it is. But I dunno. That’s a song. When I make this music I don’t have this idea that I’m going to take something really busy and strip it all back. I don’t start with something busy. It’s the place that I arrive at. These things are finished songs even though I’ve had a lot of comments [about repetition]. There’s so much out there [that repeats] like “Born in the USA,” which repeats about 70 times, doesn’t it? When you think of it like that, it’s ridiculous. How many times it repeats, that song. How did he get away with that?

Russ: Maybe it’s just comes down to the individual, how they perceive everything. Any listener is going to take what they’re going to take from the music. On the flight down to Austin, listening to the record, it was great to not only enjoy it, but the guy next to me on the plane [wouldn’t stop talking]. I was able to put on the headphones and get him away and the record took me away for the next forty minutes or so.

James: That’s really nice to hear. That’s cool.

James Blake, who is on the European festival circuit for most of the summer, returns Stateside in September for a headlining tour, returning to New York on October 5 to play Webster Hall.