Jameszoo's first studio album, 2016's Fool, was a decidedly quirky set of avant-funk pieces that boldly embraced a naïve outlook, paying no attention to boundaries and going by impulse. After adapting his ideas for the stage and working with the Metropole Orkest and conductor Jules Buckley, producing the grand live album Melkweg, Jameszoo returned to the studio, recording motorized instruments, such as the Disklavier, in order to create parts that would be impossible for humans to play. He also worked remotely with several of the musicians who played on his debut, including keyboard player Niels Broos and bassist Petter Eldh, as well as several other notable jazz and experimental electronic artists, such as saxophonist Evan Parker, pianist Kit Downes, trumpeter Peter Evans, and fellow Brainfeeder signee Dorian Concept.
Blind is, to say the least, the most challenging Jameszoo release thus far. Even more so than on Fool, he plays with silence, noise, meticulous sound design, and non-linearity. Sounds collide with each other out of near-stillness, and oftentimes the most conventional or melodic instrumentation will be the most distant, distorted, or abstracted elements of the song. "Bugatti (étude)" places busy piano chords and piercing, whirring synth tones up front, then erupts with furious, fractured drumming and squawking saxophone, ending up propulsive as well as chaotic. "Egg Modern" foregrounds fuzzy, vibrating synths, which eventually become gated trance arpeggios, and attacks them with spontaneous noise bursts. The jaw-dropping "For Drummers (and guitarists)" starts out with supremely mellow guitars, then clobbers them with explosive drumming that seemingly requires at least a dozen limbs to play in real time. The piece featuring Evan Parker, "music for bat caves," is a stunning array of jittery sequences, scattered frequencies, and intimate melodies. "Philip" is maybe the album's most sonically dense track, as well as the most joyous, particularly when it runs free toward the conclusion. "Hommage à qui" has a slow, abstract funk groove that one could easily imagine James Blake singing over, until it dissolves almost entirely, with an acid-scarred melody returning at the end. Fitting for a record that contains a spoken interlude by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the release of Blind was preceded by several short movies that owed more to experimental filmmaking than conventional music videos, and the album itself is fascinating in how far it pushes and deconstructs musical ideas while still retaining soul and spirit.