In the six years since his last album, Christiana, James Mabbett aka Napoleon IIIrd has covered a fair amount of distance, both emotional and literal. The culmination of that journey results in the release of his new album, The Great Lake. A five track exploration of the possibilities of song structures within experimental soundscapes thematically wedded to James’ personal experiences of grief, The Great Lake is paradoxically an album full of human warmth and emotion and a strident piece of abstract art, the collision point between the theory of Basinski and the melody of Northern Soul. The genesis for the album came with James’ move to London from Yorkshire in 2011. Journeying through the centre of the metropolis by bus every day he found solace in immersion in ambient and noise experiments as a travelling soundtrack, recontextualising the chaos and thrum of the city around him into something more surreal and passive. Central to the album is track 4, And the You in Between the Space. Clocking in at 19 minutes and 25 seconds, this three-part piece embodies all the aspects of the album and is a stark example of the bravery of James’ approach to the recording, his desire to challenge both himself and listener. Dropping to almost silence at its midpoint before building to a glorious, joyful climax, the album’s markers of tone, structure, melody, ambience and mood are all displayed within its boundaries; a rejoinder to those who suggest that contemporary music has nowhere left to travel.
