My Blakean Year

If you haven’t heard already, you haven’t been listening. In 2011, quiet is the new loud. The man making the least noise (and creating the most buzz) is one James Blake, 22, of London. His is a sophisticated brand of minimal electronica. With his soulful British falsetto he has given a voice to dubstep, and promptly become the modern face of it. You’ll see him crop up in ‘Hot for...’ lists, gushing online reviews and at No. 2 on the BBC’s Sound of 2011.

Not that the pressure is getting to him.
“I feel excited. That’s about it really,” he says, unperturbed. “The music’s written. What else can I do? The worst thing you can do is feel pressure while you’re writing. I’m glad I finished the album before the hype started happening. If I’d still been writing, I’d be feeling it.”
He already has four EP releases under his belt, each different from the last, each of remarkable quality. He seems like a man always looking to the next thing.
“A lot of people want me to write another ‘CMYK’. To them I say, ‘Thanks a lot for listening, but I can’t stick around’. What’s the point in doing the same thing again?”
Indeed. If only every up-and-comer felt the same way the musical landscape would be a whole lot more interesting. He sees the late Arthur Russell as someone to look up to.
“I’m fascinated by him. He did 12-inches where one track is like a disco record and on the other side it’s him playing a cello. How has someone got the balls to do that?’ It’s so... visionary. I’d love to be so prolific that, whatever you listen to from my catalogue, you relate it to that one person. It doesn’t matter that it’s all different, because it’s him.”
His music is sparse for a reason.
“The less you have going on elsewhere, the more you focus on the voice,” he explains. “That’s what I wanted. I can imagine if you don’t like my voice, then you’re not going to enjoy the record! That’s a drawback. In a way, it filters out the haters from the real fans.”
It must have been a leap moving from creating sounds in his bedroom to singing in front of the masses.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “It’s like Ricky Gervais starring in The Office, isn’t it? Like you’re starring in your own sitcom. You want it as honest an expression as possible. It took a while to come around to the sound that would suit my voice.”
That sound? Atmospheric, simplistic and bass-driven, melancholic emotion dripping through the gaps.
“If I wasn’t happy with the lyrics I wouldn’t even start a song. I write mainly on trains. I really am meticulous about the wording. They need to sound good phonetically, that’s my obsession. Vocabulary is as much an art as chords and melody.”
If, along with the likes of Burial, he is one of those artists responsible for taking dubstep overground, he seems completely comfortable with that.
“I’m not snobbish about music,” he proffers. “There’s a weird snobbery about saying, ‘Oh, I’m unique so don’t label me’. People are going to label you anyway. Especially when my sound has really been rooted in dubstep.”
There’s a beautiful comment under one of his YouTube videos. The poster says they go to sleep with Burial and wake up with James Blake.
“That’s beautiful yeah, really nice. It’s funny because I write at night, so maybe I’m writing to get ready for the day! And I’ve gone to sleep to Burial’s record plenty of times.”
Before he goes he mentions his Irish heritage.
“I’m one quarter Irish. So playing there is sort of going back to one quarter of my roots!” 25%... We’ll take him.

James Blake’s self-titled debut album is out on February 4