Loraine James - Building Something Beautiful For Me

The Quietus

The current rush of love and appreciation for the very nearly criminally overlooked work of the composer, pianist and singer Julius Eastman makes a lot of sense, given the times we’re living in. Eastman was a Black gay man from New York State who moved in the predominantly very white circles of the avant garde music scene. His minimal scores soared on insistent, repetitive loops, reaching euphoric highs, often carrying strong political messages about queerness and Black civil rights. Yet he died homeless and penniless, in poor mental health, alone in a hospital in Buffalo in May 1990, aged 49. It took until the following January for his obituary to even run, then more than another decade for a resurgence in interest after a friend shared his lost scores online. Most of his compositions and recordings were destroyed by police when he was evicted. The momentum has kept growing ever since.

Eastman is rightfully being remembered now by festival programmers, orchestras and labels around the world. The wave of Eastmania is first and foremost due to the hypnotic power of his music but also because, as an artist, he epitomises so many modern day wrongs. Although he was musically most prolific during the 70s and early 80s, the issues he faced in his lifetime remain sickeningly relevant for 2022 – the systemic oppression that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement, threats to LGBTQ rights, huge housing inequality, chronic lack of support for mental illness, a massive cost of living crisis . . . Eastman lived it all.

Queer London electronic artist Loraine James pays homage to Eastman in Building Something Beautiful For Me, an at times stunning electronic album that continues his radical, minimal legacy, while Anglifying some of his messages. Like Eastman, James often stitches social activism into her music. Her album For You and I (tQ’s 2019 Album of the Year) was a grimy, glitching pressure release of skittish beats and underdog anger. Tracks like ‘Hand Drops’ and ‘So Scared’ were about her fear of PDAs as a queer person in London while ‘London Ting / Dark as Fuck’ featured Lee Carter, aka MC Le3 bLACK, seething with Black pride and anti-pig rage.

Building Something Beautiful For Me is a gentler listen by comparison, with some anger still there – just distilled into something more gleaming and triumphant. Standout tracks are the accelerated cosmic whirrs of ‘Black Excellence (Stay on It)’ and ‘Enfield, Always’ (namechecking the beloved part of North London where James grew up in a tower block). Her hypnotising chimes recall the holographic, mesmerising dream loops of Oneohtrix Point Never, while her flattened, low key vocals and loops for days conjure up solo tracks from another working class provocateur, Hackney’s Dean Blunt.

‘The Perception of Me (Crazy Nigger)’ is James’ glowing, ambient update on Eastman’s controversially titled 1980 piano piece ‘Crazy Nigger’ – he was on a fuck-you roll after sharing his politically charged, feather ruffling works, ‘Nigger Faggot’, ‘Dirty Nigger’ and ‘Evil Nigger’ in the two years before. In fact the Black student association at Illinois’ Northwestern University protested after Eastman performed there in 1980 because they found the titles racist.

On new track ‘Building Something Beautiful For Me (The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc)’ there are none of the tense, driving rhythms of the ten sawing cellos in Eastman’s original ‘The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc’; instead James builds computerised bleeps into a swirling blur of cyclical ecstasies. She closes the album on a more foreboding note with ‘What Now? (Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc)’, her subdued and faintly doomy, warped finish to an often dazzling homage to Eastman’s thankfully not forgotten Black excellence.

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Read Jayson Greene’s review of the album.

A Closer Listen

NYC in the 60s, 70s and 80s was a melting pot of different cultural genres and a meeting point for important figures in contemporary music. The scene was filled with many artists whose influential body of work has been written about and extensively taught in formal academic curricula across the world. 

On the flip side, we can also find lesser known, yet equally influential composers who operated within the same framework and whose contributions have been brought to the light in recent decades. Be it the trend of the times (see Female Pioneers), or sheer tokenism (for some institutions), certain names might have remained obscure had History not been made more inclusive. 

The list is deep and long.  Among the artists who gained recognition from the NY scene was Arthur Russell, thanks to the long-awaited re-issues of his work from Light in the Attic. Russell, part of the queer community of Down-town NYC, was influenced by all the different musical flavours in the air, including the avant-garde, the disco and the pop, only to find it hard to belong to any of these scenes. Similarly, the work of Julius Eastman was recently unearthed and newly celebrated as that of the first minimalist Black American composer. But as with Russell, Eastman was quite un-committed to labels and categorisations. His pieces balanced minimalist, post-minimalist structures, pop-climaxes and riffs, and extended-sequences that deviated from the minimalist canon in which he was often labelled. Like Russell, Eastman could not abide by the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant template of the Serious Male Master simply because he was (in his words) a Nigger and a Gay. The titles to some of his pieces like “Evil Nigger,” “Crazy Nigger” and “Gay Guerrilla” are testimonies to his overtly political stance and take on “minimalism”.

Back to today’s London, a modern meeting point for art and culture, composer Loraine James bravely undertakes the difficult task of reinterpreting Eastman’s oeuvre by “employ[ing] samples, melodic motifs, themes and imagery, and inspiration from Eastman’s canon, slicing, editing, pulling apart and playing samples like instruments to craft a stunning album that venerates Eastman’s genius while adhering to her own.” Building Something Beautiful For Me brings James in direct conversation with Eastman as fellow Black, gay artists operating in different decades and cities but unified by a genuine interest in exploring, experimenting, subverting and queering their sounds.

On this record, James loads Eastman’s work through her electronic music filters. Opener “Maybe If (I Stay On It)” takes Eastman’s repetitive riff from “Stay On it” and freely metamorphoses it into a recited mantra. Metamorphosis is perhaps a key term in understanding Eastman’s own work, but also James’ process of redefining structural, tonal and melodic elements from the original stems  into something new and personal. James’ recent exploration of more textural music can be found here in “Choose to be Gay (Femenine)”, which departs from Eastman’s “Femenine” by creating a vast ambience of textural repetitions surrounding James’ voice. Similarly, the closing “What Now? (Prelude To The Holy Presence Of Joan D’Arc)” only references Eastman’s 1981 track “The Holy Presence Of Joan D’Arc”. The new version explores tone and texture as forms of repetition and permutation, folding and unfolding sounds through a sampler in a seemingly improvised and free-form manner until the fade.

Building Something Beautiful For Me is not exactly a tribute record, nor is it a collection of reworks of Eastman’s pieces, but an open invitation to reflect in a very personal way.  James rediscovers and redefines herself by experimenting with fragments of Eastman’s work, creating a collection of introspective electronic pieces that are at times reminiscent of early IDM and ambient but, like Eastman’s work, escape easy categorisation. (Maria Papadomanolaki)