The life and work of American composer Julius Eastman is both a tragedy and enigma. A Black gay classical composer active in the late 70’s, Eastman’s work was alarmingly ahead of its time though widely unknown today. Incomprehensible to his contemporaries, there’s a genius to Eastman which is only now being recognised for its audaciously queer innovations in minimalism, where he was amongst the first to utilise its processes in tandem with pop. Much of Eastman’s work is notoriously difficult for orchestras to perform live, due to Eastman’s approach to writing his scores in accordance with what he called “organic music”. The performance notes for Stay On It, for instance, relegates much freedom to the players, inviting repetition, improvisation, and play at their will; more jazz than classical, really. In attempting to both archive and bring to life Eastman’s work, it makes sense that Matt Werth’s experimental music label Phantom Limb should turn toward the contemporary. Like Eastman, London producer Loraine James is a minimalist at heart. Her music, while rhythmically complex, is often made from fewer than three or four elements. Also like Eastman, James understands the power of the cyclical. Last year’s breakthrough album Reflection was scattered with looped phrases, some stretched across and others buried beneath the bars of her jagged footwork and drill experiments. Bequeathed with a zip folder of Eastman originals, a biography on the artist, and transcribed MIDI stems, it is James who Phantom Limb elects as Eastman’s legatee, resulting in an album that is as breathtakingly beautiful as it is poignant.
James is the perfect candidate for this exchange. In a sense, she embodies the potential of who Eastman might have been had he existed at a different point in time. As a fiercely talented Black queer composer with a distinct point of view and binary shattering approach to back it up, all that James is celebrated for now is, arguably, what Eastman was ostracised for. The tragic poetry of this is not lost on James nor ignored in her approach to this album, and she thoughtfully embraces Eastman’s archive as an inheritance of sorts. This sees James execute the work with a deft sense of understanding and respect, an heir apparent who has meticulously studied her predecessor before ascending the throne. She approaches the hour long opus of Femenine by extracting the essence of its thesis statement. Choose To Be Gay (Femenine) becomes one of the album’s most triumphant moments. James tenderly lifts the fanciful whimsicality of Eastman’s brass and string symphony to sublime heights, transposing it into a radiant, albeit pensive, work of drone and ambient synths. The whole thing wraps itself around you, James’s simple speak-sung “you say that I chose to, and you say that I won’t” lingering long after it leaves, the silences in her syntax holding more weight than any words could.
Download and stream Building Something Beautiful For Me here
The way James samples, chops, edits, and superimposes atop of Eastman is masterful and sensitive. She neither butchers nor buries him, she reveres him. The original titles of Eastman’s compositions feature in parentheses attached to her own as a genealogy of sorts, but these are no reproductions. Rather, James allows for a dialogue between herself and Eastman. When Eastman shouts Crazy Nigger, James sees herself, or rather how people perceive her, and creates something in accordance to this response. She does not counter the argument nor does she attempt to copy it, but rather invites Eastman’s music as a prompt for her own instincts. From Stay On It, for instance, she finds both a heartbroken R&B ballad and a frenzy of dissonant, almost farcical chords. Maybe I Should (Stay On It) adds to Eastman’s theme by wrapping James’s pillowy vocals around an iteration of Stay On It’s final refrain. Later on Black Excellence, she pulls from the composition’s kinetic first act, warping the theme into increasingly more chaotic dabs of noise.
In this sense, the album is equal parts education and innovation. It serves to introduce Eastman to who would have ostensibly been his audience today, while presenting James with the challenge of honouring this history without sacrificing the making of her own. It’s a challenge which she rises to without question, more often than not striking a balance between herself and Eastman that feels, well, organic. The beauty of this album lies in how James finds herself in Eastman’s music, much in the way we can assume he might have intended. His music was not made for the white, cis-hetero gatekeepers of classical and academic taste. Instead, it spoke toward the experience of existing as an outsider. James’s inheritance of the Eastman legacy transcends Building Something Beautiful For Me beyond homage; it’s a stunning course correction that looks to give agency back to an essential and undervalued voice silenced too soon.
Listen to Choose To Be Gay (Femenine) from Building Something Beautiful For Me below.
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