Igloo Magazine :: Loraine James :: Live @ ICA (Sep 9, 2026) / It’s Nothing Personal (Self Released)

A voice against the circuit

Live @ the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (Sep 9, 2026) ::

In conjunction with the release of her second album in the space of five months, UK glitch pioneer Loraine James brings her increasingly voice-centered explorations to London’s prestigious Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). A literal queen performing a stone’s throw from a king’s palace. The symbolism practically writes itself.

Canada’s Eden Samara opens proceedings with a stunning vocal and theatrical performance, drawing a thoroughly unified audience into her drum-and-bass-adjacent take on electronic music. James soon enters stage left, skillfully navigating material spanning both recent albums. Increasingly, the voice becomes another instrument in her arsenal, with murmur and machine edging towards an uneasy marriage in which neither quite relinquishes control.

The evening’s breathtaking peak arrives with “Ending Us All,” the standout from the extraordinary Detached from the Rest of You. Joined by regular cohort and drummer Fyn Dobson, James unleashes the frankly wicked Le3 Blacks, whose street-textured vocal chants cut through the electronic wreckage. His vulnerable, life-chopped-into-pieces narrative wrestles with stuttering breaks and helter-skelter phrasing, the whole performance teetering between collapse and cohesion. It’s a thrilling demonstration of how much emotional weight music can carry when it seems perpetually on the verge of coming undone. Here, fracture isn’t a flaw to be corrected but a language in its own right.

Smoke hangs in the air as lighting moves through greens and purples ::

Elsewhere, elongated, stuttering synths stretch into warm, insistent undulations, swelling and shifting with an almost organic persistence. The sound seems to breathe, occupying time rather than simply marking it. Smoke hangs in the air as lighting moves through greens and purples, blues and reds. The atmosphere is immersive without becoming alienating, and the ICA proves a wonderfully homely container for music that refuses to sit still.

There’s no sterile futurism here, no po-faced celebration of technological cleverness. The machinery has a pulse; the abstraction has a body. James makes room for precision and instability, vulnerability and abrasion, the carefully constructed and the gloriously unruly. Her music is complex without being cold, fractured without being lifeless, playful without surrendering its emotional weight. The performance confirms that these qualities aren’t merely the product of studio construction. They have a life of their own on stage.

Honestly, such an event, in such a wonderful space.

Following an album as accomplished as May 2026’s Detached from the Rest of You, Loraine James faces an interesting challenge. That record embraced a diversity of collaborations and stylistic forays, all of which, from my seat as a subjective observer, succeeded magnificently. It’s a stunning work, and having spent considerable time inside it, I consider it her best to date: in its cohesion, accessibility, breadth, heart and vulnerable beauty. Apparently, others have different views. Shock horror. Disparities of opinion can make us richer, even as they present an artist with a challenge. Whether or not the reception of its predecessor has informed this new direction, It’s Nothing Personal arrives as a deliberate counterpoint, exchanging some of that album’s breadth and intricacy for immediacy, concentrated energy and forward-facing funk. The question is whether this shift in emphasis amounts to something more than a reaction. The answer, emphatically, is yes.

How these tracks came about, or how they were ultimately curated, matters less than what they have become. This is a remarkably cohesive yet stylistically diverse collection that smacks the chops of the listener with immediacy and functional force. An astonishing piece of work, it knows what it wants to do and is entirely unafraid to do it.

From the outset, “U Get Me” announces itself as grown-up, come-of-age contemporary electronic music in all its splendor. Rip-terai G-funk and neoclassical textures collide, their opposing forms smashing together like modernist artworks in a head-on expression of the age. James draws from familiar sonic territories without becoming beholden to them, transforming her materials into something distinctly her own.

Her understanding of form and programming comes into particularly sharp focus on “Tokyo.” Staccato beats and stuttering sub-bass splice every available space with impressive fury. If contemporary electronic music has a forward-facing face, this track might just be its beauty spot. Stunning.

“Catch This” edits tightly into “Tokyo,” the transition completed in the blink of an eye. Like a drum machine falling apart, its faltering is its funk. James introduces soulful strings, pads and vocal chops that briefly suggest a drum-and-bass excursion before heading somewhere altogether less predictable. This is hybrid tek-funk, difficult to categorize and all the better for it. The atmosphere hangs like clear blue skies while the beats terra-firm the ground beneath our feet. Tender and fractious. Broken and perfected.

“James draws from familiar sonic territories without becoming beholden to them, transforming her materials into something distinctly her own.” ~Will Wonks

“Oi! What You Tryna’ Be” follows with junglist-adjacent beats that never quite resolve, while teched-up chants punctuate the breaks with vocal commands. James understands the power of withholding resolution, allowing tension itself to drive the track.

“Just the Same” finds James on vocal duties again, delivering a performance that is soulful, confrontational and gloriously unorthodox. Her singing refuses conventional expression yet fits the musical framework perfectly. Like Mark Stewart and The Mafia, the voice serves the message, the narrative, the tale within the telling. And, like a Paul Thomas Anderson film, the story may be elemental, but other intentions lurk beneath the surface, leaving the listener to arrive at their own conclusions.

James doesn’t perform to the gallery. She makes music she loves, discovering its possibilities in the act of creation rather than working towards predetermined expectations. Her vocals are central to that approach, challenging established ideas of what a voice in electronic music should do. Character and expression take precedence over conventional polish. The result can be disarming, even confusing, but it is never merely formulaic.

“Back to Skill Riddim” introduces elements akin to soca, its hard beats propelled by wiry bass while vocals and top line ping-pong off one another. Almost three minutes of pounding sound-system energy, it feels like the funky doorway to another tune, isolated and championed in its own right. It is carnival. It is a spark turned into thunder. It is wicked.

“Got My Mojo Back, Cos I’m Worth It” brings a taut, neofunkian construction of stuttering breaks, with James joining in chopped low-and-high vocals that underscore the interplay between melody and counterpoint. It’s tightly controlled rhythmic invention, its parts continually shifting against one another without losing their collective momentum.

The music opens a door, and for a moment, we are elsewhere ::

Then there’s “6 Button Tekken Combo,” a track of which my dreams are made. Subtle, nuanced, frantic and soulful, it finds beauty in decay, which dances here like a flower duet. Arpeggios rise in concentric circles of smoke; flickers of flame illuminate warm summer sensations and a euphoric appreciation of simply being alive. It evokes a moment of unitive consciousness, a peak experience in which the boundaries between self and world briefly dissolve. There is no need to explain it away. The music opens a door, and for a moment, we are elsewhere.

The closing piece, “I Am Loraine James,” brings us gently back to earth. Its tender, tacit textures sit alongside increasingly unsettling beats, offering a kind of error balm for the modern day. It is a fitting conclusion: warmth without complacency, comfort without denial of the fractured world beyond it.

“Perhaps that’s what makes this music matter beyond its technical ingenuity. It offers neither an escape from the world nor a prescription for how to live in it. Instead, it makes space for complexity, for uncertainty, for the possibility that things need not be resolved to be beautiful. In a culture that so often demands clarity, conformity and completion, there is something quietly radical about that freedom.” ~Will Wonks

Loraine James embodies contemporary electronica precisely because her music resists reduction to any single reference point or allegiance. The past fifty years of production and electronic evolution form the landscape from which she works, but no single lineage adequately explains what she does. She occupies the missing space in the jigsaw, the piece that makes the larger image suddenly legible. And we get to share in the finished picture.

In that sense, yes, it is nothing personal. Yet art has a curious capacity to become intensely personal to those who encounter it. We bring our own histories, fractures, hopes and vulnerabilities, and the music meets us there. Beneath the restless programming and stylistic invention lies something profoundly generous: an expression of curiosity, freedom and care. The album’s apparent contradictions are not problems to be solved. Its fractured forms can be tender; its restless rhythms can offer release; its imperfections can reveal unexpected beauty. James doesn’t need to reconcile these qualities into a single, tidy statement. Their coexistence is the point.

Perhaps that’s what makes this music matter beyond its technical ingenuity. It offers neither an escape from the world nor a prescription for how to live in it. Instead, it makes space for complexity, for uncertainty, for the possibility that things need not be resolved to be beautiful. In a culture that so often demands clarity, conformity and completion, there is something quietly radical about that freedom.

Because, ultimately, it is imbibed with Love.

It’s Nothing Personal is available on Bandcamp (Warp Publishing).