Building Something Beautiful For Me

Description

Celebrated UK producer Loraine James joins Phantom Limb for breathtaking homage to vital NYC composer Julius Eastman, reinterpreting, reimagining and responding to key works for a brand new album.

In 1990, the composer Julius Eastman quietly passed away, out of the spotlight, a young man. By his death substance-addicted, homeless and broke, he was unforgivably overlooked in his lifetime. Still, the legacy of creative work he leaves is far more befitting to celebration than destitution. Only a portion of his music remains a deeply regrettable sidenote to an already heartbreaking story but this work represents a glorious and beautifully hued depiction of a composer totally in step with any modern great we could name.

Phantom Limb are long-term fans of both Eastman and Loraine James. Using their rare, fortuitous connection with Julius surviving brother Gerry, the label began this new project in summer 2021, hoping to continue the current tide of efforts to reinstate Eastmans rightful place in 20th-century composition. Loraine was offered a zip drive of Eastman originals (courtesy of Gerry Eastman), Renee Levine-Packer & Mary Jane Leachs illuminating biography Gay Guerilla (University of Rochester Press, 2015), and transcribed MIDI stems (courtesy of Phantom Limb A&R James Vella), and the resulting album Building Something Beautiful For Me carries the Eastman torch with finesse and sensitivity. Loraine employs samples, melodic motifs, themes and imagery, and inspiration from Eastmans canon, slicing, editing, pulling apart and playing samples like instruments to craft a stunning album that venerates Eastmans genius while adhering to her own.

Speaking in similar tongues as young, gay, Black, independent creatives in a challenging environment, the two musicians are bound closely together, despite a six-year gap between their lives ever intersecting. James includes the original Eastman title in many of her tracks, appending the source material in parentheses to mark the lineage of the work a clear, traceable thread from the heavenly to the sublime.

Album opener Maybe If I riffs on Eastman staple Stay On It. Its arrestingly pretty central melody is reshaped into a living, undulating canvas on which James IDM-inspired beat production flickers and swirls. A repeated vocal line pulls Eastmans towering work of modern minimalism towards reclassification as a song. Next follows The Perception of Me (Crazy N), channelling Eastmans righteous anger and knowing reclamation of the brutally charged N-word into a quasi-ambient exploration of Eastman piano samples set to skittering beats. Elsewhere, opening side B, Enfield, Always acts as a creative response to our past master. While Eastman purposefully, slyly intermingled Uptown NYs stuffy professionalism with Downtowns loose fervour, Loraine is a London artist, bound into her locale with the same honour and justified sentimentality as Eastman was with his. And like Eastman, the tracks heady percussion and ecstatic arpeggios contrast intentionally with its austere backdrop.

In keeping with key Eastman codes, Phantom Limb engaged Black creatives to complete the record, including acclaimed designer Dennis McInnes for the album packaging, which is inspired by Eastmans marginalia on his own (surviving) manuscript pages: we sought to visually convey the complexity of what we may see as beautiful, how beauty is misunderstood and often lies beneath the surface.

One of the UKs most brilliant and boundary-pushing electronic producers. The Guardian

This restless innovator is smashing electronic musics binaries to bits in order to build something more utopian. Pitchfork