“Playing Robots into Heaven,” is the final and title track of James Blake’s 2023 Republic/Polydor LP release. The studio album, Blake’s seventh, is more akin to his early material but doesn’t neglect the nips and tucks that over the last few years have garnered him mainstream appeal. If you find yourself inquiring over the title, you will begin to gain a notion of its meaning upon hearing the four-minute track and then develop a fuller understanding upon seeing the official video. Directed by Thibaut Grevet, the album cover features a still from this video.
The day is hot and wearisome, and the track is waves that will lap at your toes, and with coolness take fever from the dream. In the video Blake walks as a robed monk through the wilderness with an acoustic phonograph type horn affixed to a synthesizer and directed at heaven.
To make the song, which is beatless, I’m sure Blake used the pipe organ preset on a Casio PT-100 and played it through the speakers they play the actual organ through at St. Pat’s in NYC. I’m not positive. Either way the heavens are as full or as empty as they’ve ever been, and we’ve lost our ancient channels to the divine. Robots trained to sing heaven bound praise by James Blake is a beautiful place to start.