Jamie Lane: Pleroma | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Baby-faced beatmaker Jamie Lane is back and he’s been getting busy during the pandemic. For a man as hyper-focused on music-making as Lane, the time away from the dancefloor has been a gift, now delivering the fans that rarest of things from a dance producer: a whole album’s worth of work. It’s not short on ambition, either. Is Pleroma what that strange name promises, a summation of divine power? What, in the name of the ancient gnostic mystics, has Jamie Lane been up to?

He emerged, in many ways fully formed, on 2018 single Sink, with a choppy and emo r’n’b that was nonetheless highly infectious bass-music, racking up five-hundred-thousand streams on Spotify; I hope Lane invested the fifty cents he reaped wisely. As you might be able to tell from the title it wasn’t lightweight or throwaway, but what reviewer Reece Dargie termed “a bass-heavy pep-talk with himself to overcome the fear of losing his passion for music to his obsessive tendencies”.

That chat clearly had the desired effect because Lane returned the next year with his debut EP, Minimal Haze, on the Boss Battle label. Deepening his craft, mixing in a variety of styles -trap, upbeat funk, jazzy downtempo- there’s a lot to like at a surface level, while Lane again busied himself with more cerebral concerns, trying to find the perfect balance between musical vibrancy and the personal darkness he injects into his lyrics.

2020 was an unusual year and maybe not a great one to move from Brisbane to Melbourne; perhaps it was divine punishment for these words:  “Brisbane is home; but culturally speaking it’s a slow-moving place. The night life is pretty lifeless, the electronic scene is pretty much dead…Melbourne is a much bigger place and is artistically very rich & vibrant, as an artist; getting closer to the action is always a good thing.” Arriving when he did, therefore, may have been something of a disappointment, but Lane hardly wasted his time: starting with a signing to Sydney label Source, which has an eclectic roster of veteran artists, from Tex Perkins to Midnight Pool Party; august company for a young beatsmith.

2022 heralds the release of his debut album, Pleroma and in maturity of sound at the very least, Lane justifies rubbing shoulders with his label-mates. Perhaps it’s not surprising in a producer as wide-ranging and typically moody as he is, but the ghostly atmosphere of the record’s opening numbers have me thinking again and again of London iconoclast Burial; especially NRG with its vocal samples, housy two-step, ethereal echoes and late-night emptiness. It’s not one they’ve been flogging in the lead-up to release, but it’s hard not to be impressed by it.

Less gothically inspired but with big single energy is the house bounce of Sanctuary, you can see why it’s been chosen for a focus. Drown is -contra the title- wonderful, firing everything in the Jamie Lane arsenal into a cut that’s just busting its maximalist borders; those synth scales that shoot for the stars are really something. Love the breakdown in the middle where the sound devolves into a sinuous techno snake, one that reminds me of why I like Jon Hopkins a lot, before everything builds back to an even bigger finish.

The techno influences feel stronger as the record hits its middle strait: take a cut like Forever which bonds bittersweet harmonies to propulsive forward movement and … throws in some house piano chords that I didn’t see coming. Soon enough we’re back in moody r’n’b, however, with another single like Chrome where Lane again appears to be expressing an aversion to human contact: “Can tell we’re wasting time / Why bother connecting I / Just see them passing by / See better when I shut my eyes.” If it means he spends more time in the studio making music, I guess I’m okay with that.

The record keeps offering surprises to the end, with a bulging fusion dance cut, Attune, that crashes a synthwave intro into very techy techno and surprisingly syncopated rhythms, for a result that is its own thing, but still feels intuitively enjoyable. Closer Abraxas is much less intuitive, maintaining the techno urgency but leashing it to the kind of craziness that you’d find in PC Music. In a record where we’ve been many places, sure, why not go here too?

Underneath the gnostic mysticism of Pleroma, what is it? Lane calls it the “unattainable cycle of reaching toward purity through art while imprisoned in a material world.” Go a layer further down again and I think you’ll find a producer who just really wants to explore every corner of his craft and hates being constrained by the exigencies of the biz; a really thorough dislike of making music that’s ‘fit for consumption’ as he puts it. I’m pretty sure this contributes to the consistently left-field qualities of … everything about Jamie Lane. His principled stance is etched in the strange and eclectic beats, the soul-searching of his writing and all the other spine-tingling oddities to be found on this record. I suppose there’s no shortage of lost souls and strange tastes in the world, it just happens that Jamie Lane’s are infused with a good deal more talent than most. I’d go as far as to say there is indeed a stirring of divine power in Pleroma.

- Chris Cobcroft.