James Blake: "Order"/"Pan"

James Blake’s trio of 2010 EPs swept me with graceful strokes into an ever-broadening camp of wide-eyed overnight superfans. So when he settled down to the keyboard to croon out his (almost immediately?) de rigueur debut record, something unexpected—something magnanimously independent but at once intrinsic to that early material—emerged to continue the exciting inertia of, in my slavering opinion, a truly innovative young artist.

Which is to say: I am absolutely tickled to find that James Blake has decided to release the overtly minimal “Order”/“Pan” 12” as the immediate follow-up to his critically lauded self-titled LP and its concurrent singles.

Addressing my own strange sense of surprise, I have to ask, defensively perhaps: is there even a reliable pathway through the minefield of public expectation in the artist’s consideration anymore? For Blake, emerging fully formed in the spotlight as he has, just about any treatment of the projected expectation of his audience could be construed, in the minds of both artist and public, as contrived from some doubt-inspired measure of reactionary pandering. It seems reasonable to assume that a considerate individual strategy to calculate or wrest any amount of personal control over the public perception of the artist’s evolution is impossible to formulate, defeated by the public demand to know exactly what it is you’re giving us and where to put it.

But then Blake teleports below the surface of prediction and everything that he’s done before to release his most minimal work yet. “Order,” comprised of a simple one-measure rhythm and just enough glowing white noise pushing in from the background to lend the perfect eerie plod between almost ominously jovial, baritone vocal samples, is so minimal—everyone: How minimal is it?!—that it hardly lends itself to the term “dubstep.” By the latter half of the track, though, a very unique groove has emerged from its repetition, lending a sense of searching evolution to the whole affair.

“Pan,” on the other hand, has a little more of the right kind of swing to feel dubbier, and employing a bubblier vocabulary it fits in better with the languages of post-dub friends like Mount Kimbie and Greenwood Sharps. “Pan” also employs a wider variety of some choice noise samples, which float in and out of the track in a slow, barely melodic parade of ghostlike static. It really becomes the standout here: a very well-crafted minimal dub track, and, self-professed superfan as stated above, I’d probably keel over in some kind of dorky ecstasy to hear that Blake was interested in making a full-length more oriented toward this kind of stuff.

Conclusively, “Order” acts like “Pan”’s warm-up, but together they make a nice package. Plus that super-cool Hemlock label makes it something more than worthy of adding to your collection. And as it turns out, the public may still be willing to sit back and truly play audience to an artist willing to challenge himself and the expectations that gave him his profile. Though people who were more interested in Blake’s self-titled LP may find this single a little unrewarding, it’s absolutely recommended for professed followers of minimal techno. Wherever you fall in all this, fear not; we can’t be sure of what’s coming, and that’s a blessing.