James Blake has revealed that a new-found love of analogue synths helped to define the sound of his latest album, Playing Robots Into Heaven.
Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe about how the record came to be, Blake admitted that it began with him “fucking around with sounds and having fun”. He describes his modular setup as “an amazing outlet for addiction or ADHD,” but over time, it became apparent that it was also conducive to productivity.
“I just had this increasingly large folder of modular jams that I’d been making,” Blake told Lowe. “I had like 120 modular jams and they were all like an hour long, and I was just going through them.”
The next step was to turn these jams into “pieces of music that were listenable,” because as Blake admits, not all modular experiments are what the average listener would describe as ‘tuneful’.
“A lot of that stuff, it can be a bit… some of it’s atonal, some of it’s not necessarily in song format. It’s just like long periods of synth exploration, shall we say.”
Despite these stylistic challenges, Blake suggests that, in comparison to the making of some of his other albums, the creative process on this one was more comfortable. “Every skill that was required to make this record was already there,” he claims.
As Lowe points out, though, such is the freewheeling and inspirational nature of modular gear that you could argue that Blake ‘collaborated’ with it rather than simply ‘used’ it on this album, and the producer is happy to acknowledge the creative influence of one module in particular.
“I owe more to more to Intellijel, who make the Metropolix sequencer, than I do to Stevie Wonder on this album,” says Blake. “The machines definitely spoke for me in a lot of this.”
Inevitably, the discussion also turned to AI and its potential impact on creativity, but as Blake points out, the idea that machines can do some of the heavy lifting isn’t exactly new in music-making circles. “There’s a lot of talk about AI and stuff but generative music’s been around a long time,” he reminds us.
Even so, Blake acknowledges that the new technology will have an impact, but it seems that, right now, he’s happy to view it in a positive light.
“AI’s going to open up a lot of possibilities for composition,” he believes. “I think there’s a lot of very exciting things going on with it. For example, there’s this one guy who creates a synth called Synplant, which is this thing where you can put in any sample - say it’s the sound of me going ‘derr’ - and then the synth would recreate that sound on a synth, magically. It just does it - you don’t have to do anything. You can imagine a thing and it just can be there.”
The end result, says Blake, could be a levelling of the playing field. “There’s going to be a lot of people who can make music who weren’t previously able to in the ways that they want to,“ he predicts. “I think it’s really interesting.”
Playing Robots Into Heaven is available now.
