In the streaming era, music has become the fuel of the Internet’s endless white-noise machine. Lo-fi ambient music—much of which mines and dilutes the more engaging sounds of hip-hop—has become big business for wellness companies selling increased productivity through sonic curation; platforms such asand Apple use it as feed for playlists with names like “Apply Yourself” and “Back to Work.” Between theand such apps as Portal, Tide, and Brain.
These are the aims that guide the electronic singer-songwriter James Blake’s new album, “Wind Down,” created in collaboration with the A.I.-powered app Endel, which collects data on individual users from devices like the Apple Watch and generates personalized ambient music in real time. Blake, best known for his moody self-titled début, from 2011, and the Mercury Prize-winning “Overgrown,” from 2013, is just the latest artist to “collaborate” with Endel; others include the R. & B.
The sounds recorded on this album aren’t songs, per se, but they possess surprising glints of melodic elegance. There are quiet droning passages interrupted by slivers of voice, and busy riffs that streak like marbling. The album’s fifth track, titled “5th Soundscape,” is representative of the album’s balance between quiet and activity: a synth line holds like the horizon as piano arpeggios dance along the surface.
Blake’s artistic style is well suited to the sounds of nightfall. It’s easy to hear the makings of these soundscapes in the spectral voice-and-piano intro of a song like “Radio Silence,” from Blake’s 2016 album “The Colour in Anything,” or the hushed, underlying coos in “Life Is Not the Same,” from last year’s “Friends That Break Your Heart.” But even his most pleasant tracks can carry somewhat dreary undertones, as if something’s brewing at the edge of the frame.
Still, listening to “Wind Down,” one gets the sense that the soul of Blake’s music has been separated from the machine and is drifting off on its own. In place of layered, propulsive songs, these arrangements seem suspended in air, unmoored from any semblance of personality and instincts. Though often lovely, this is by far Blake’s least interesting album—and it’s unsettling that that’s by design.
hey, that's cool if you like it
Crap in other words.
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