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I’d met someone, and I intuited something in store for us. I was feeling open, raw, intense, and slightly mad, but better. For me, Overgrown had become an obsidian funerary monument, but one with the dark gleam of new possibilities. After a couple of weeks of solitary day drinking, I had spent a few more working up a head of steam in my nightlife. I was coming off of a seven-year-long partnership that had ended - how else? - painfully. Maybe my tempered expectations were partly why the concert made a profound impression.īut there was another reason, too. I wondered how its volatile synthesizers, hissing basses, and rococo drums could possibly make it to the stage with all their detail, precision, and physicality intact. He was on tour for his second album, Overgrown, whose cryptic, severe beauty seemed inextricable from its sculptural sense of stereo space, frequency, and timbre, its otherworldly stasis. In the spring of 2013, Blake performed at Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, North Carolina. I keep listening because I want to grasp it, and so the music generates the very frustrated desire it addresses. But as with everything I find durably transfixing, there is also something that eludes me, a palpable but inaccessible essence.

This is what romance does, too, which roots Blake’s music in sensuality at a level below its undulant rhythms and clenching, gasping vocals. Like all of his music, “Timeless” animates a liminal state - the moment just before or after an event, slowed down and blown up. These qualities all resound through an eerily tranquil bass meditation from Blake’s new album, The Colour in Anything. But Blake stills time in his own way, tying it in recursive loops instead of trawling extreme durations. It refines stillness from rhythm, silence from sound, and space from compression, a whiplash in a line running from Messiaen and Morton Feldman through Brian Eno. It furnishes abstract forms with vital energies of resistance and tension. It’s moody, minimal, and monumental, my three M’s. The British singer and electronic producer James Blake’s music has many of the qualities I’m elementally drawn to. James Blake performing in 2013 (photo by Henry Laurisch/Wikimedia Commons)