Performed live, the opening of James Blake's "I Never Learnt to Share" is an essay in all that is almost gothically fascinating about the 22-year old producer and singer. Seated behind his pair of keyboards and panoply of pedals and switches, he takes a nervous breath and sings, "My brother and my sister don't speak to me. But I don't blame them. But I don't blame them." He then repeats this twice again, singing along with, looping, and layering the three parts of his harmony without skipping a beat.
It's a complex figure, and the concentration on his face evinces the innumerable solitary hours spent crafting these passages, and honing these techniques. For 40 seconds, he seems entirely elsewhere. Then his oscillating, tremolo organ part begins to build and the song sets off on another wave.
Having earlier the same night seen Julianna Barwick and tUnE yArDs do interesting things with solo vocal and loop arrangements, this seemed a completely different territory.
Blake, however, wasn't the sole point of interest in the set. Touring with a guitarist and a percussionist, the live aspect sheds a new light on several of his pieces. The audience's spontaneous mid-song applause was evidence enough of this, breaking out at the tempo-change of a spacey, dubbed-out percussion solo.
Music like Blake's is most effective when attuned to its economy of means - that is, when it does a lot with a little. When you start with a minimalist sound that is delicate, dark, and at turns theatrical, and let it take control of a high-ceilinged, shadowy church space, a little pretty quickly becomes quite a lot.
