As gifted in production as he is in songwriting, James Blake is a multi-faceted artist that draws from his background in experimental electronica to create the soulful but sonically adventurous ballads that make up his contemporary output.
On his latest album, Trying Times, Blake decorates his heartfelt crooning with scattered electronic beats, nervy synths and processed samples, resulting in a hybrid sound that owes as much to the cerebral post-dubstep of his early years as the more conventional influences – Joni Mitchell, D’Angelo, Leonard Cohen – that have shaped his songwriting.
Blake brought together these two sides of his craft on Trying Times highlight Death of Love by sampling the title track from Cohen’s 2016 album You Want It Darker, a creative decision he unpacked in a recent conversation with co-producer Dom Maker (one half of Mount Kimbie) for BBC Radio 6 Music’s Artist In Residence series.
Blake and Maker lifted the vocals heard in the song’s opening to create the eerily evocative instrumental for Death of Love, which were performed by a Cantor Gideon Zelermyer and the Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue Choir, an ensemble belonging to a synagogue in Cohen’s hometown of Montreal. Clearing the sample was quite a feat, Blake says, but it was Cohen’s son and collaborator Adam that helped them over the line.
“His son actually cleared the sample,” Blake says. “We weren’t sure if it would… I don’t know of Leonard Cohen ever approving a sample. There may have been a couple, but it’s quite rare, so I was very honoured. Maybe he liked the song, or possibly there’s a throughline between the feeling of both things, and I was respectful of the sample itself.”
The Cohen sample isn’t the only unexpected inclusion on Death of Love, Blake says. In an effort to augment the song’s unsettling vibe, he and Maker sampled a dub siren gifted to him by revered dubstep producer Mala, and the SOS signal sent out by the RMS Titanic before it sank into the Atlantic, which appears at the end of the track.
“Right at the end, the song wasn't really done,” Blake says. “I remember [Blake’s partner and co-producer] Jameela… it sounded good and it had impact, but there was just another 15% left, though I didn't really feel that way at the time. I was just going, ‘No, it feels done, it's fine’. But Jameela was like, ‘No, there's another 15% in this, this could hit harder.’”
“That’s when you were like, ‘can you try and get hold of the Titanic SOS’?”, Maker says. “There was one last touch, and I was looking for Morse code, which I believe also may have been Jameela’s idea,” Blake adds.
“[We wanted] the feeling of ‘we are in trouble’, basically, without actually being too on the nose about it. The only thing that actually sounded good was the real Morse code from the mayday on the Titanic. It was very eerie to listen to, and to read what it meant… and it just fit right in with a little bit of reverb! [laughs]”
Blake’s Morse code is unlikely to be the “real” Titanic SOS signal, as no audio recordings of the ship’s wireless transmission exist. Instead, he will have sampled a modern recreation of what radio operators at the signal’s receiving end will have heard, using transcripts reconstructed by historians from handwritten logs.
Regardless of its origin, though, the Morse code lends the song a suitably distressing atmosphere, representing another example of Blake’s talent for taking his tracks to another world by weaving in samples from unexpected sources.
