Loraine James, “Detached From The Rest Of You”

“IDM” or “intelligent dance music” was originally posited as a novel idea of taking club music and turning it into head music. But as it developed, its practitioners started taking it to an avant-garde extreme, fully deconstructing dance music in the process. At the same time, it became an exclusionary term that was liberally applied to white men and not others, who may have been making cerebral forms of dance music but was strictly not allowed into the IDM sphere.

In this context, almost two decades later, Loraine James’s music was something of a revelation, taking both the ambient and rhythmic opposite ends of the IDM spectrum, and turning them into sensual music. Maybe that could have only been achieved in the hands of a young, Black, queer woman. “IDM is obviously a bunch of white guys, and I’m from a different time period. But I don’t really care about the term being negative or positive. I feel my music is IDM and I do my own spin on it, being inspired by other stuff and fusing it all together,” she said to Pitchfork. That spin is sensuality, bringing IDM back to its emotional core that the genre had moved away from. Her previous albums like For You and I and Reflection are full of tender, quiet moments as she reflects on physical absences. Her music defies easy genre summation, consolidating grime, glitch, deconstructed club, ambient, and even pop/R&B. Given how wide she casts her net, her music might seem fiercely experimental, but it is still dance music at the end of the day, using crisp, drum beats at the forefront to frame an impressive ear for musical textures.

Her newest album, Detached From the Rest of You, is a continuation of the subtle evolution of her sound on Gentle Confrontation, an album that tested out more organic textures and flexed her songwriting chops. Again, there’s a sense of fearless experimentation here as she tests her own limits as well as the boundaries of electronic music. After bringing in live drums with black midi’s Morgan Simpson on Gentle Confrontation, she does it again here. Death Cab for Cutie (whose off-shoot Postal Service was her introduction to electronic music) drummer Jason McGerr provides a rock beat for “Peak Again,” so it’s fitting that she enlists the frontman of a rock band for help on vocals in Low’s Alan Sparhawk for her most overtly “rock” song yet. Later on, “Ending Us All” also uses live drums to serve Le3 bLACK’s rapped verse so the track feels like a blend of nu-jazz, electronic, and hip-hop. Elsewhere, “Score” feels like a sequel to 2019’s “Sensual” thanks to the honeyed melodies from Anysia Kym, enjoying a banner year after her appearances on both Sideshow’s TIGRAY FUNK and Earl Sweatshirt/MIKE/Surf Gang’s Pompeii / Utility.

Though she consistently works with interesting collaborators, including Cibo Matto’s Miho Hatori who introduces the themes of “Flatline” in Japanese, it’s ultimately Loraine James’s sound design that’s able to fold in these disparate genres and different vocalists into music that is uniquely hers. That, and lyrics that often feel like glimpsing into private-diary thoughts. “I think especially with electronic music, I wish there was more warmth and more vulnerability,” she once said. That mission statement has informed all of her music, and Detached From the Rest of You is no different. On “A Long Distance Call,” she articulates the strangeness of being close to someone emotionally but not physically, with the heavily glitching drums sonically representing what it feels like to be on a call with bad connection. Elsewhere, seven-minute opus “Forever Still (Steel)” begins with an incredibly bracing drum solo and then slowly disintegrates towards unstable ambient as she declares over and over “I will be forever steel” as if willing herself to believe it. Her albums are all gentle confrontations, and Detached is no different: introverted but not shy, restrained but not submissive, steel but not still.