Jamie Woon – Lady Luck

So it occurred to me sometime between parking my car and entering my lecture room this morning that I have totally turned into a downtempo fanboy. Just a year ago, you would’ve been hard pressed to find a track on a playlist of mine that didn’t have enough bpm to make you vomit or enough thumping, bone-crushing base at regular intervals to shake your inner organs to their foundations – and thus vomit. In essence, for the majority of my life I’ve always been a fan of vomit-inducing music. Say you felt like you were going to throw up and I whacked a pair of headphones hooked up to my mp3 player and ratcheted up to 11 (as if headphones have such levels), odds on you’d end up puking. In any event, terms like ‘chill’ and ‘acoustic’ and ‘ambient’ didn’t factor into my music library beyond the obligatory Air, Zero 7 or Jack Johnson (don’t hate) track. And then something, somewhere, changed.

Now, I have such a defined mental image of my havaianas that it seems unnecessary to do any more shoe-gazing. Where it used to be a question of weeding out the odd Moby track on runs to keep the pace going, my exercise dilemma has turned into the real impossibility of locating a track that motivates me to do anything but lie on the floor in a heap and watch the clouds and play with my fingers. I’ve turned into a sample fiend, a downtempo denizen and the perfect guy to put together Ministry of Sound’s next Chillout Sessions. And I never even wanted to be that guy. It’s just taken over my life. Somehow, a real appreciation for the sparsity of a couple of xx tracks evolved into a genuine interest in James Blake’s strange and eery soundscapes which snowballed into me priding myself on actively discovering new pioneers of the movement and busying myself categorizing them into fanciful genres. I don’t know how it happened and yet, for some reason, I’m not so sure I want the quiet revolution to stop.

Thankfully, today’s subject Jamie Woon has injected a bit of much needed life into my otherwise so-relaxing-I-might-jellify listening sessions. Obviously, given much of the above, when I first heard Woon – who graduated a London arts school the year after Amy Winehouse (trivial fact!) – I was immediately attracted to just how ‘chilled’ his whole vibe was. I’ve gotten to the stage where if you can describe something as ‘chilled’, I have to have it. But beyond that, it’s hints of 90s-era R&B (particularly reminiscent of Blackstreet’s ‘No Diggity’) that has me hooked. The sound of ‘Mirrorwriting’ – Woon’s debut LP due out April 18 – is distinctly old-school but with the sort of sample programming that was never afforded to those premier acts at and before the turn of the century. It’s this hybrid of traditional soul and new-age warbling bass coupled with bleeps and blobs and a grimy, metropolitan feel that makes Woon (like that other Jamie – Liddell) and ‘Lady Luck’ so interesting. Plus, he gives me an excuse to say that I have ‘urban’ music all up in my staid mix.

Jamie Woon – Lady Luck

WoonSpace – it’s like the best sci-fi game you’ve never played.