E-Mail This Article to a Friend Motown madness Jamie Lidell finds his inner soulman BY SIMON W. VOZICK-LEVINSON
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"I love doing this song," Jamie Lidell told the crowd October 12 at Rothko, an über-hip club on NYC’s Lower East Side. It showed: midway through "Game for Fools," the laid-back slow jam that opened the set, he couldn’t have seemed more comfortable. Crooning wearily about a love affair gone wrong, he turned Rothko into his own personal, Al Green–inflected cabaret.

Lidell’s not the type to stay in one place for long, however. After a couple of songs, the pale-faced, wisecracking Englishman whipped off his trenchcoat to reveal a gold-colored robe, and he hunched over a small flotilla of electronics. The crowd watched, not sure how to react, as he launched a series of improvised glitch-house freakouts, hurling distorted vocals into a dissonant maelstrom of arrhythmic jackhammer beats, howling feedback, and bursts of chainsaw organ.

A few years ago, fractured sounds like these were Lidell’s passion. The noisy blend of avant-electronica and free jazz on his debut, Muddlin Gear, fit right in with a Warp roster that included Autechre and Squarepusher. But when I catch him on the phone, as he’s preparing for his appearance at Barcelona’s Sonar festival, he tells me that machine music came to seem "quite gimmicky. After I finished the first album, a lot of shit changed for me. I couldn’t go back and just make another electronic album. I wanted to make something that had this classic quality to it."

So he turned to the music of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Prince. Working in a Berlin studio on his new Warp release, Multiply, he fine-tuned his voice, gathered vintage instruments, and created music that evoked his soul heroes. Aside from a few hi-tech hiccups in the production, his deconstructionist instincts vanished into thin air. It’s easy to forget you’re listening to a glichtronic master as the breezy Holland-Dozier-Holland swing of "Music Will Not Last" and the shuffling horn funk of "Newme" flow by.

Multiply’s soul man, he insists, is the real Jamie Lidell. He speaks fondly of formative years worshipping Berry Gordy’s Motown roster while his peers moped out to indie dirges. Those years were spent in Cambridge — "not exactly the thriving soul capital of the world," he admits. He’s not the first white boy to find salvation in an African-American muse — not even the first Brit. But how serious is the new-found soul of this electronic Elvis? "You must understand," he says, "I don’t know how it came to be like this. It’s a mystery to me, but I really feel it. I sound like an Englishman right now, and when I start singing, maybe it’s just because of the way I grew up, it just comes out like that."

Of course, he doesn’t think in rigid genres. "I have a kind of difficulty holding a linear thought track. Just hitting shuffle on my iTunes, you know what it’s like, I’ve got thousands of tracks. One minute you’re with Marvin Gaye, the next minute you’re with Merzbow. We all kind of intertwine, especially in this day and age."

As his last salvos died away at Rothko, Lidell stepped away from the buzzing circuits and invited the audience on stage for a mellow stroll through "Multiply." The more genteel hipsters had fled the club a few sonic gutpunches previously; those who remained climbed up and followed him to the dock of Otis’s bay, singing along: "So tired of repeatin’ myself and beatin’ myself up, gonna take a trip and multiply." Lidell grinned, exhausted.

His recent identity crisis suggests that those lines are more than convenient rhymes. Now that he’s found his soul muse, you wonder where he might head next. "I’ll probably go mad thinking of this question [of authenticity]," he tells me. "Maybe I’ll just have to record some English folk songs."