mathattack
Beautiful beautiful album. Electronics and vocals for the soul. Much love to Loraine James for putting this out there. The world is now a better place and I'm a better human ❤️
Favorite track: Choose To Be Gay (Femenine).
World of Echo
Taking inspiration from Julius Eastman, Loraine James has made a perfect album. This is an artistic triumph. If you don't love this album, then I fear we might not ever agree on anything. I'm dead serious.
Subscribe
now to receive all the new
music
Phantom Limb releases,
including
38 back-catalog items,
delivered instantly to you via the Bandcamp app for iOS and Android.
You’ll also get access to
subscriber-only
exclusives.
Learn more.
"One of the UK’s most brilliant and boundary-pushing electronic producers." – The Guardian
"A map of James’ own complicated emotional terrain, one in which signposts of Eastman’s work reappear like symbols in a dream." – Pitchfork
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 Eastman’s rightful place in 20th-century composition. Loraine was offered a zip drive of Eastman originals (courtesy of Gerry Eastman), Renee Levine-Packer & Mary Jane Leach’s 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 Eastman’s canon, slicing, editing, pulling apart and playing samples like instruments to craft a stunning album that venerates Eastman’s 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.
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 Eastman’s 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.”
credits
released October 7, 2022
Artwork by Dennis McInnes and George Edge, Cave Studio
Mastered by Alyn Sclosa
The debut effort from Australian electronic producer Lovefear balances cloudlike ambient with hyperactive synths and twitchy drum loops. Bandcamp New & Notable May 12, 2024
UK producer Sunbane's latest LP, moody electronic music with an experimental pop heart, was made from a place of intense personal struggle. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 6, 2020
