Over the past few years, James has steadily built a reputation as a vital new voice in electronic music on both sides of the Atlantic. He’s played prestigious London venues like the Barbican and Village Underground in London and toured Europe, as well as being named Pitchfork and KCRW’s ‘best new music’ in the US. And his music has been championed by the likes of tastemakers Gilles Peterson, Mary Anne Hobbs, Bradley Zero and actor Cillian Murphy, and from BBC 6Music to NTS.
Third album Magic Seeds is a rebirth of sorts and his most ambitious project yet. At the beginning of the recording process, James went into the studio in London and played keys with drummer Leo Taylor (The Invisible), violinist Raven Bush (Speakers Corner Quartet) and producer/engineer Oli Bayston (whose recent credits include Kelly Lee Owens). “It was just the four of us in a room for one day, improvising and enjoying the thrill of playing together,” he says. “I was thinking of the Talk Talk record Spirit of Eden, the way they wrote it for months in the dark and then heavily edited it afterwards. I wanted that feeling of a real room of musicians, rather than using samples.”
James embarked on the mammoth task of editing those sessions down into songs when he emigrated to Lisbon in 2022. Alone in a new place, he could focus on rearranging everything with laser-like precision over the following two years. The live recordings, as well as the analogue synthesisers, lends the album an organic pulse and rhythmic looseness, while its cavernous atmosphere and grainy layers call to mind trip-hop giants Massive Attack and hip-hop producer Madlib. Opening track and lead single ‘Smoke in the Air’ sets the scene, spectral and gently hypnotic. There are often literary and artistic references in James’s music but here it was the “barren romance” of the film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Like many songs on Magic Seeds, ‘Smoke in the Air’ also evokes the wonder of the natural world but also the threat to it, underlined by gritty, DJ Shadow-influenced bass. The album has a sense of foreboding, but a lightness that draws you through to the end.