For the video to accompany the track “9°C”, from Loraine James’ second release under the Whatever the Weather moniker, the artist focuses on Japan, featuring grainy shots of Tokyo’s infamous Shibuya crossing, apartment buildings, scenes of a plane taking off from a sun glare-filled window seat with a shot showing the enormity of Tokyo from the air, and the Kyoto-bound bullet train as Mt Fuji appears in the distance beyond the endless suburban detritus of the city.
Listening to James‘ minimal synth wanderings, interspersed with field recordings of children, makes for a natural soundtrack. But rather than a seeming juxtaposition of sound and visual, the music brings out a certain peacefulness reflected in the city. The music seems to say, Tokyo may be bustling, but stroll far enough down a Shibuya side street and you’ll find a quiet neighborhood with low-slung houses and a single oden restaurant using a broth that may have been simmering for decades.
Like the previous Whatever the Weather album, Whatever the Weather II continues to use Celsius temperatures as track titles. However, unlike James’ first album under the name, the temperatures themselves never dip to sub-freezing or spike to sweltering. Instead, there’s an ambient sheen over the entire record, a reflective certainty in a world where, thanks to climate change, such calm can’t really exist.
Sure, “20°C” stirs up a few clouds of skittered synth pads, but even here, the sounds of chatter, perhaps in a café, lend everything a little sun before being overcome by a cloud of glacial, minimal keyboard. The jittering percussion is now relegated, like the café chatter, to the background. It’s as if everything is being reeled in, pulled home out of the rain.
James hails from North London, and on her 2019 Hyperdub debut, For You and I, a listener can sniff out her exposure to the city’s grime and UK drill scenes. Yet her releases on the more ambient-focused, long-running Ghostly International imprint as Whatever the Weather sound as if they were created by someone else entirely. “8°C”, for example, is a nearly-whispered solo keyboard line, a meditation on rain-streaked windows in early spring or the comedown after a night out clubbing. “23°C (Intermittent Sunshine)” is a wind chime-like loop that’s warm but not oppressive. It’s hypnotic in its repetition and, at two minutes, drifts out of sight like a wave from a departing friend on a slowly moving bus.
Here and there, a placid distortion hovers over incoming waves; we’re in Fennesz territory now, specifically Endless Summer’s “A Year in a Minute”, but where his track percolates, Loraine James’ beachscape hums.
Listening to “9°C” again, without the video, the field recordings of children come more to the foreground, the keyboard serves to remind us that 48 degrees isn’t quite spring. Japan’s massive urban center seems nowhere in sight. However, that’s the beauty of this record. The temperature can be external or internal; what you see or feel when you listen welcomes opposites. Do tracks conjure images of the desert or the tropics? Cityscapes or weed-choked countryside? Well, yes, they do.
In a recent interview, James discussed her process for this album. “There’s a lot of me playing around with things, mainly having fun. I just press record… [and] play for four minutes. It… feels very relaxed — just playing to myself. And then I end the recording and I sit and – I won’t do anything with it.” The lack of hyper-edits and instead, the willingness to wait and see where things land, trusting her own musicality to go with it, is at the heart of why this album is so meditative. Because of this, Whatever the Weather II harnesses Korg sequencers, Ableton redux-enhanced field tapes, and granular synths for whispered, subtle rhythms and drones as pop songs.