James Blake
photo: knar bedian · cc by 2.0 ↗James Blake Litherland emerged from London's post-dubstep scene with a run of 2010 EPs before his 2011 self-titled debut album redrew the boundaries between UK bass music and confessional soul singing, built on cavernous negative space and heavily processed falsetto. Overgrown (2013) won the Mercury Prize, and Blake has since become one of pop and R&B's most in-demand producers and collaborators, working with artists from Beyoncé to Kendrick Lamar to Frank Ocean while continuing his own increasingly song-based solo records.
Blake came up through the same South London dubstep-adjacent scene that Burial helped define, and the hiss, cavernous reverb, and chopped, ghostly vocal samples Burial pioneered on Untrue are audible ancestors of the atmospheric space Blake builds around his own voice.
listen forBurial's 'Archangel' chops a soul vocal into disembodied fragments floating in reverb; Blake's 'Retrograde' keeps a full vocal but surrounds it with the same crackling, submerged-in-water production feel.
D'Angelo's loose-in-the-pocket, deeply intimate neo-soul vocal style — recorded close and dry, then layered into ghostly harmony stacks — is part of the R&B vocabulary Blake filters through electronic production, especially on his more song-based, falsetto-heavy material.
listen forListen to how D'Angelo stacks and murmurs his own voice against itself on 'Untitled (How Does It Feel)', then hear a colder, more spectral version of that same layered-falsetto intimacy on Blake's own 'A Case of You.'
Blake has cited Stevie Wonder among the singer-songwriters who shaped his sense of melody and harmony, a soul foundation that sits underneath even his most electronically processed vocal takes.
listen forStrip away the vocoder-like processing on Blake's 'The Wilhelm Scream' and the chord movement and vocal phrasing owe a real debt to the melodic patience of classic Stevie Wonder ballads.