Jamie Woon - Making Time

Looking at Jamie Woon for the first time, any sense of coordinates goes straight out the window. Jamie is a child of the world, or at least of Asia or South America. “I’ve been told I look Peruvian, Native American, Mexican, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese,” he said himself in an old interview with the Guardian. The difficulty in pinning down his origins, though, is just a hall of mirrors, a trivial bit of ethnic curiosity. “If that’s the first question people ask me, it bothers me. I’m curious too about where people come from, but it can feel like you’re being judged on your looks. They wouldn’t ask me that if I weren’t mixed-race,” he adds. And really, who can blame him? With a Scottish mother and a Chinese-Malaysian father, Woon grew up between worlds and cultures that couldn't have been further apart, while always keeping both feet firmly planted in the world of music.

Born March 29, 1983 in New Malden, a London suburb, Woon is the son of folk singer Mae McKenna, who from an early age brought him along while recording backing vocals for Kylie Minogue and let him freely experiment day and night in the family's small home recording studio—a formative space where teenage Woon spent hours and hours recording his voice and sketching out his first songs. Jamie's uncles, Hugh and Ted, are also musicians, best known as members of the Alex Harvey Band. Woon only really got serious, however, during his years at the Brit School, the same institution that produced talents like Amy Winehouse and Adele. Once his studies were finished, the main path forward was shown above all by soul music and the cutting-edge electronic sounds fashionable in the UK at the time, particularly the dubstep of the Hyperdub catalogue and a then still totally unknown Burial, with whom Woon co-wrote one of his rare “commercial” hits in 2010, “Night Air”, included on his dazzling 2011 debut album, Mirrorwriting. 

It's a notoriety that confirms the potential already shown back in 2007 with the single “Wayfaring Stranger”, whose remix by his friend Burial amplifies its pulsing soul. A dry run for the very long gestation of a debut album that Woon worked on for three long years, sharing a house in Clapton, East London, with the musicians of Portico Quartet, labouring for months on his MacBook and recording vocals at The Way studio in Hackney, before spending another two months in a cottage in Trevone, Cornwall, where he recorded all sorts of things: clicks and taps on wicker furniture, and the sound of stones in a stream turned, for the occasion, into a snare drum.

Woon's eccentric methods, which recall those used in the studio by Queen in 1975, are a constant throughout his career. Three years, then, separate “Wayfaring Stranger” from “Night Air”, the first single taken from Mirrorwriting, the explosive debut of a then twenty-seven-year-old Woon. Three years during which the young man stood still, sniffing out the various trends on offer across Albion, before finally playing his twelve aces, slipping like a vampire into the dubstep-garage clubs scattered across London and slowly making contact with the nocturnal micro-world of dubstep, which he winks at to give rhythm to his tracks, in a scorching fusion that generates condensation with a uniquely irresistible sonic imprint.

The contrast between Woon's various harmonic twists and his smooth melodic lines thus generates a sudden wave of heat, hypnotizing both the senses and the soul. Neo-soul fascinations à la Timberlake, projected onto UK garage percussive variations: Mirrorwriting shows just how unstoppable the rise of an exponentially evolving musical phenomenon can be. And if the beginning was “Archangel”, the arrival—the completed mutation—is there to be savoured in full in “Gravity”: sudden guitar flourishes in the vein of Michael Hedges laid over dubstep pulses, with Woon's burning voice offering comfort. The already-mentioned “Night Air” opens the album, its crescendo emblematic and representative; its particular atmosphere, the mood it conveys, permeates the whole record. It's a path partly trodden also by James Blake, another rising star of soul-step.

“Feel that night air flowing through me”… Night as a free zone, a night whose sinuous, silent magic awakens and unsettles the artist, who distills from it a dismayed, tender poetry of confessions, sweetness and laments; inspiration and magic are drawn not from daylight but from the dark, indistinct nocturnal abyss. An enchanted, suspended night guides the inspiration: a night steeped in passionate light, paved with lanes of strings and keyboards in burning shapes. Lanes where digital sounds flow like lights of revelation. And, almost mimicking that stillness, Woon entrusts the interpretation to the modesty of an emotional voice, both burning and reserved. The singing is a sigh, a shiver that absorbs the frenzy of daylight hours and places it in the balm of night's discreet refuge (“Daylight fills my heart with sadness/ And only silent skies can sooth me”). The bright colours of these sounds echo in the air, in the atmosphere; they shine by contrast, reverberating in the darkness. And so it is that, out of desolation, a yearning for love stirs and ignites, suspended between destruction and attraction.

An unusual “blues” sensibility, night as refuge, as private discourse, as romantic torment. In this respect, Mirrorwriting seems to recall the solo debut of one of the fathers of house music, Larry Heard (Mr. Fingers “Introduction”, Mca, 1992). But not only that. Woon embodies a new form of seduction, through which the metropolitan nihilism conveyed by dubstep's dark tones merges seamlessly with the alluring, exciting and comforting charge of today's brighter mainstream r'n'b. A small great miracle, however, followed by an extremely long first pause. It was China, in fact, that caught Woon's attention after an exhausting first tour. The call of his father's origins made itself felt in the then twenty-eight-year-old London singer-songwriter: “I'm grateful for the opportunity to live and work on new music in China. Despite knowing so little about Chinese music, I'm excited to connect with the ancient city of Xi'an and its current music scene, and to start a mutual exchange of music, new and old. I plan to write new songs and recordings and I'm open to collaborating with people from the city”, an enthusiastic Woon told Prs Foundation. The eastern embrace came after he was included in the Guardian's “New Band Of The Day” list, and four weeks later in Radio 1's playlist and at the top of the BBC's “Sounds of 2011” list at the start of the year. The choice to move to China for a while would serve to recharge and regroup.

Four years would pass, however, before Jamie Woon set foot in a recording studio again. Four very long years during which the boy became a man. Indeed, the first impression one gets listening to Making Time, the English songwriter's second LP, is of an incredibly mature musician, sure of his own abilities. Gone, then, is much of the post-dubstep electronic sheen of the past, making room for richer, more elegant and more concise instrumentation. Double bass, bongos and horns act as a counterpoint to an r'n'b formula that in more than one instance winks at the more elegant side of soul music and a certain chamber jazz. Overseeing Jamie in the control room this time is the attentive producer Alex Dromgoole, aka Lexxx, well known to industry insiders for his past work with Bjork, Madonna, Gwen Stefani and Goldfrapp.

Making Time, true to its title, is an album in which the passage of time takes on absolute centrality in both lyrics and melodies, often wrapped in an emotional knot of deep nostalgia, between moments of awareness more or less steeped in melancholy and unconditional tributes to one's own past, laid out here and there with the grace of someone who appreciates the details and the many nuances that seem, only at first glance, less important, but which are in fact essential in tracing the actual emotional memory and a newly acquired awareness of one's own journey. Take, for example, the opening track “Message” (“I have to say that it was all I could do to decide/ When I was with it I was playing ahead of the time/ Made a start and I was walking to weather the storm/ But if you look up and you stop”), musically poised halfway between Bill Withers and David Sylvian. The same can be said of the phlegmatic, dark “Lament”, which sounds as if it could have come from one of the early solo albums of the former Japan frontman, both for its understated atmosphere and for the weight of the double bass placed front and centre, reinforcing that evocative mood of mystery and deep unease. Pressed on the album's long gestation, Woon told Flush: “I wasn't in a rush, I just wanted to feel like I had something new to say and that I'd found the right people”. A terse answer that would later find new resonance, confirming the songwriter's timeless approach. Words that echo a thought already expressed to The Badger in 2011: “The goal is to make good songs. In the past I've had offers that would have meant a lot of money and fame, when I didn't have enough good songs or hadn't yet defined my sound. So I simply took my time. There's nothing worse than ending up hating your own records”.

The rhythmic and acoustic textures of “Forgiven” further confirm the path taken, while the guest of the moment, American Willy Mason, is simply perfect in interpreting the meditative, ecstatic reflection on time of “Celebration”, backed on the chorus by Woon himself, who sings the song's central refrain with simple words that leave little room for further interpretation: “Making time on the rhythm/ This one’s mine all for giving/ Feeling fine for the living/ Mmm”. The extremely soft acoustic ballad “Little Wonder” picks up the poignant, intense thread of the unforgettable “Waterfront”, which closed the debut album so beautifully, just as the oblique exoticism of “Thunder”, enriched by Woon's unsettling, elusive vocals, once again highlights the album's stylistic signature—one which, unlike its illustrious predecessor, largely forgoes the virtuoso support of electronics.

Making Time is a record played with the mind and heart of a soul craftsman facing the second act of his life and artistic career, backed by an instrumental background of absolute reliability. It certainly lacks the potential hits found on the unsurpassed Mirrorwriting, and it lacks the soul-step flashes of his earlier work. And yet its melodic grace remains unchanged, and its acoustic substance duly reinforced. And after that? Silence. A great deal of silence. Woon doubled his usual sabbatical between records and returned ten years later, by which point everything had changed. And he did so by surprise, reappearing on the radar like a castaway from a recent era that nonetheless feels, in practice, impossibly distant.

For Jamie Woon, time must still carry a largely Tibetan meaning. But the ten-year sabbatical that took the English songwriter away from (his) world hides contours that are anything but spiritual.

Woon spent days, months and ultimately years at the mercy of the void that looms when the page is still blank and the pick struggles to dance across the strings. He himself hinted as much in one of his recent (and rare) social media appearances, later distilled into a press release as terse as it was clear, particularly regarding the role played by producer and friend Martin Terefe: “He saw my struggles and supported me. He somehow convinced me to make an album: we made one song, then another, and when we had ten, we said it was finally a record. I honestly wouldn't know how to explain this music. To me it's extraordinary that it even exists”. Words that hint at an unexpected miracle, it seems, even for Woon himself, who had been inactive since the glory days of Making Time, which at the time also earned him a Mercury Prize nomination, performing live at the 2016 award ceremony.

3, 10, Why, When: if titles are maps, then Woon is a poor pirate, because however cryptic it may appear, this string of numbers (indicating the release date), verb and adverb says everything about his unexpected reappearance. The first two singles, “Heavy Going” and “A Velvet Rope”, do even better, showing us that, beyond the “lost” time, Jamie would only come back once everything made musical sense again: the first is a ballad suspended over melodies just barely Sylvian-esque, on which Woon sings of unchanging fragilities and cries directed at the Moon; the second goes even further, moving at a slower pace, through a scene that is at first lunar and ultimately liberating, painted by a synth that builds an irresistible chorus. The choice of these first two tracks is far from arbitrary, starting with the emotional weight of the verses and their potential impact, so much so that the other two songs made public early on don't break from that pattern either: “When”, with its “Lady Luck”-like verve, and “Pulling On A Thread”, with its sumptuous strings and sparkling bass.

Jamie knows the pain will never truly end, and he's content to accept that, so he aims not to surrender to what was about to drag him to the bottom of the ravine, or to the “bottom of the glass”, to paraphrase one of his own metaphors. It's no coincidence that at one point he invokes philosophical maxims like “amor fati”.

The light of the four “singles” is, after all, the same light that radiates through the album's other six stops, an album with virtually no dips, driven from first note to last by an endless desire to be reborn and finally come to terms with things—above all with the delirium of a middle age that distorts everything. Out come, then, invocations with gospel touches in “All The Way”, just before the synthetic dance of “Place N Time”.

These are songs played, sung and produced with downright meticulous care. Once again, they confirm just how obsessive Woon's approach to music can be, a trait inherited largely from his mother. 3, 10, Why, When moves away from the more elaborate structures of Making Time, and the reborn Jamie hits the mark even when he chooses to work by subtraction, letting himself be accompanied "only" by a drum machine and a looping synth line (“The Heart’s Mountain”). The same happens in the most elusive moments, like “Ghost”, or when his skill as a postmodern soul crooner resurfaces (“What’s The Matter”). And this speaks volumes about the undisputed (and intact) mastery of a musician who had long been written off, and whose comeback almost no one believed possible anymore.

* Thanks to Fabio Russo for his contributions (“Mirrorwriting”)

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

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