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Australia’s electronic composer extraordinaire Jamie Stevens has had a busy month. First, his hugely acclaimed set at Balance Croatia, where a loved-up crowd from around the world came together and witnessed Hernán Cattáneo in the wings as Jamie dropped Hernan’s remix of his single Dust. This was a full circle moment as Jamie was invited to perform live recently for Hernán’s massive Córdoba shows in Argentina to 20,000 people, where he first aired early versions of some key album tracks.
Jamie Stevens is well known for being a founding member of ARIA award-winning Wollongong trio Infusion, one of the most important electronic acts to hail from Australia since the nineties; often referred to as Australia’s answer to Underworld. Single Girls Can Be Cruel and album Six Feet Above Yesterday left an indelible mark on the electronic music landscape as they toured global festival and club circuits relentlessly, including memorable sets at Glastonbury, Coachella, Roskilde and Creamfields.
However, after releasing an acclaimed catalogue of dance music, expansive enough to fill multiple boxsets on the world’s best dance labels (Bedrock, Anjunadeep, Mango Alley), Stevens has found the perfect moment, vision, and feeling to step forward with his first solo album offering; Beginner’s Guide to Floating.
A project defined by integrity, depth, and timeless musicality, Beginner’s Guide to Floating is a totally different beast altogether veering from this evergreen period of club focused material. Despite long being celebrated as a master of emotional resonance and sonic storytelling, weaving soundscapes that strike straight to the heart, this debut album has been a real long-term project. Jamie searched over the last five years for worthwhile themes, meanings and musical connections that would produce a worthy body of work that resonates on a deeper level and remains true to Jamie’s values of always placing artistry above hype.
He finally found this connection initially through a series of singles for revered electronic dance imprint Music To Die For which included early versions of Stay, With You and Transference that are now featured on the album. These received support from the who’s who of leading DJs like Nick Warren, John Digweed, Joris Voorn, Above & Beyond, Sasha, Markus Schulz, Giuseppe Ottiovani, Lee Burridge and Dave Seaman among hundreds more. Then through Beginner’s Guide to Floating, Jamie discovered solace and form in something visionary; a series of intimate images conjuring transient natural light, cinematic soundscapes, bokeh and deep-hued afterimages, the emotional equivalent of tracers and floaters.
Jamie Stevens tells us more about the impetus of record:
“I’d always wanted to make a solo album separately to Infusion, but it had to it had to mean something truly special to me; and until now, I was never quite settled on what direction to take. As a solo artist, I’m predominantly known for club ready singles and remixes. I was very conscious of wanting to change that and find themes and concepts that aligned with the sort of albums I grew up with and shaped me. Labels like 4AD and Mute, bands like My Bloody Valentine and Four Tet and composers like Max Richter and Cliff Martinez. Albums and the process of sitting and listening to them from start to finish with varied stories were a big part of my DNA and who I’ve become and embody what I love about music. Working with real instrumentation, strings and vocalists brought it all together, so finding Wilma, Skye and Brooke were a significant part of that process taking shape.”
And that’s what you hear on Beginner’s Guide to Floating.
Jamie Stevens is a craftsman at exploring emotion and atmosphere sonically, drawing feelings from inside of you that just connect and hit differently. He has released enough material to fill many albums, but for an electronic musician who values integrity over hype, a solo album entailed waiting for just the right moment and combination of concept and feelings to crystallize. The hint’s in the name – floating, never floaty. Not the escapism of wealthy doof gurus and weekend spirituality, but something closer to the perspective conferred by an out-of-body experience. That perspective can accommodate melancholy nostalgia (‘Ergo’), tender utopianism (‘Transference’) and a recognition of the joy and pain that wheel themselves around on the ground below (‘Tell You Later’). Because this is a beginner’s guide, Jamie plays his role as psychopomp with gentleness, leading listeners almost imperceptibly over crags and meadows, between light and shadow. But the power and emotional range in this album is a striking revelation from someone so publicly self-effacing and unilaterally positive.
The gateway into this brave new world, ‘Erosa’, is pure atmosphere and texture, which serves as a perfect opener. It’s certainly inviting, but there’s still an air of ceremony with echoes of synth dignitaries past and present (from Vangelis to Nils Frahm) bouncing around the stereo field, and the combination of a warm welcome with this weighty musical heritage mirrors Jamie’s rare blend of humility and quiet respect for the sublime.
Now a slight upwards incline with ‘Tidings’; a gracious, softly crunchy take on naturalistic house music, with the feeling-tone of a rambler snapping a twig on a frosty winter morning’s walk. With a veteran DJ’s sense of timing, Jamie follows this with one of the album’s many peaks ‘Stay’ (a club version was a key highlight on John Digweed’s revered DJ mix ‘Live in Stereo’). Here the track uses an up-to-the-minute breakbeat paean that pays homage to the starry-eyed origins of progressive breakbeat while reminding newcomers how it’s done. Vocals scatter around the spectrum with dreamy eyed abundance, the riff otherworldly and the vocals dripping with lament, yearning, love and sorrow creating an unescapable, natural serotonin high.
Barely a second to catch your breath before another high Calling All the Gods, as legendary Morcheeba frontwoman and songwriter Skye Edwards casually drops in for an Address to the Nation, accompanied by weighty guitar-centred instrumentation. Resisting the impulse to manufacture a pop hit, Jamie plays to the qualities that have made Skye so universally lauded – quiet confidence and a sultry, spiritual tone built on a sense of blues history that resonates deep and delivers a seductive familiarity that’s altogether a cathartic, soothing experience.
Although the album resists highlighting an obvious centrepiece, this leads into the breakbeat beauty of ‘Transference’ (Guided Version) a strong contender, simultaneously danceable and bristling with enough pathos to convert the staunchest drum machine naysayer. And similarly, its perfect companion the subsequent ‘Haze’ contains the blueprint for the album the still point of the churning scene – yearning, chopped up rave vocals; Reese baselines writhing about like eels; and percussion nodding to early breaks and playful UK two-step while incorporating the freshest of sound design.
The narrative takes a swift turn off-track on a foray into dream rock aesthetic with lead single ‘Dust’ (already featured on Spotify’s lauded New Music Friday playlist), with Aoteoroa’s esoteric mainstay French for Rabbits collaborating with Jamie for a trailing sequence of low-tempo, woozy half memories. Think a post-modern shoegaze electronica so good that it feels deserving of its own Twin Peaks scene.
After so many high points, you could expect a gentle wind-down now, but with nothing left to prove, playful crests and meditative trances start to alternate with increasing rapidity, forming an accelerating waveform of their own. There’s a feeling of replaying a completed video game and being pulled fondly by the hand down a grassy slope in the early sunrise by a scene head who’s outgrown a need for chemical assistance.
So we stop off at a little afterparty where a lady dressed as a jellyfish is wiggling in the clear light of the void (‘Tassolem’); glance back one last time to the shimmering ecstasy of pre-commercial free parties (‘With You’); dance and weep the last liquid out of our bodies (‘Ergo’); light a stick of incense and giggle at the unlikely evolution from amoeba to Taoist monk (‘Coilplume’); and finally bow out to the agonising sound of Wilma’s indelible cello workout – find our tent, enter our sleeping bags (inside out, as always) and collapse into womb-like gratitude for the weird aberration that is electronic music and the ineffable emotions that draw us and back to it through dancing, DJing and writing, doing whatever this is, and knowing (to our great relief) that that it’ll never be finished.
