Jai Paul: "BTSTU"

The first time I heard Jai Paul, I thought my speakers were broken. My friend had just sent me a YouTube link to the British singer's 2011 single “BTSTU”-- about which this friend had been talking breathlessly, ecstatically, and seemingly hyperbolically-- and I was ready to be knocked out by obvious brilliance. What I heard instead was… disorienting. Undulating waves of distortion and digital interference, and buried somewhere beneath it all a distant, oddly confrontational falsetto (“don’t fuck with me, don’t fuck with me…”) that seemed like it was coming out of only one channel. I jiggled the input cable. I unplugged and replugged my speakers. I started the song over. Nothing had changed. “Is it supposed to sound like this?” I typed into my Gchat box, but hesitated before hitting send. (On the internet, even your hesitation is visible: “Lindsay has entered text...”) I let it sink in for a minute; the first time you hear something that is good in a new, unfamiliar way, it takes time for the particles to rearrange into some sort of discernible grammar. By the time the second chorus hit, I had deleted the question. Yes, it was supposed to sound like that.

This past weekend, Jai Paul’s music was once again responsible for confusion and disorientation, though this time it was a little more widespread. Last Saturday night, a collection of 16 untitled tracks claiming to be Jai Paul’s mythically-delayed debut album appeared on a Bandcamp page, where you could download them for £7. The internet collectively freaked; inevitable comparisons to My Bloody Valentine’s recent out-of-nowhere release mbv were tweeted and retweeted. But the joyful moment was short-lived. By Monday morning, the files had been pulled from Bandcamp, and journalist Owen Myers tweeted that he'd received an email from Jai calling the leak "illegal" and stating, "I have not released a new record. This is an unofficial release. Official releases are handled by XL." By the afternoon, conspiracy theories were flying. Had someone stolen Jai's laptop and thought they could make a quick buck charging album-price for some unfinished demos? Fearing that Jai's alleged perfectionism would stand in the way of him ever releasing any more material, had a close acquaintance shared the tracks without their creator's consent? Was this all an XL publicity stunt? Had Jai uploaded the songs himself to spite his record company?

Listening to a Jai Paul song sounds like a tuning into a pirate

radio station being broadcast directly from someone’s brain.

Jai Paul is about as secretive and enigmatic as Burial and as press-averse and slow-working as Terrence Malick. His story has always been a magnet for words like "allegedly" and "apparently," and conducive to conspiracy theories because so little is known about him for sure. XL signed him in 2010 on the strength of the "BTSTU" demo alone, and since then he's officially released only one other song, the gorgeous, hiccuping slow jam "Jasmine" (which came out, rabid fans are quick to note, in mid-April 2012-- very nearly the same day "BTSTU" was released in 2011 and those 16 tracks were uploaded last week.) Snippets of other songs have been passed covertly on message boards; journalists humble-brag about private listening parties where they've supposedly heard finished tracks (last December, XL sent out a Christmas card to a lucky few with a photo of Jai on the cover; it played a clip of a song known as "Str8 Outta Mumbai" when you opened it). "BTSTU"'s life has been much more public than Jai's-- it's been sampled by such high-profile names as Beyoncé ("End of Time") and Drake ("Dreams Money Can Buy"). Its elusive creator, on the other hand, only just made a public Twitter account on Monday, and at the time of this writing has only issued one message: "To confirm: demos on bandcamp were not uploaded by me, this is not my debut album. Please don't buy. Statement to follow later. Thanks, Jai." It's since been retweeted nearly 2,000 times.

Jai Paul: "Jasmine" (via SoundCloud)

As the Bandcamp refunds begin to trickle in, not much is clear about how these songs went public or how long we'll have to wait before we hear Jai Paul's proper debut. But there is one thing that pretty much everyone who shelled out the £7 cannot shake: these tracks-- brimming with ideas, innovation, and eccentric personality-- are jaw-droppingly good.

Listening to a Jai Paul song sounds like a tuning into a pirate radio station being broadcast directly from someone’s brain. Unexpected sounds interrupt like interference from the next stop on the dial, and the vocals and instruments fade in and out like you're one town over from where the signal comes in clear. Occasionally, a Jai Paul song can also sound like a live DJ set-- kinetic, free-flowing, and a little off-the-cuff. But you often get the feeling that you are the only person listening to this radio station, or the only person at this club. That's probably the most interesting contradiction at the heart of Jai Paul’s music: It's at once distant, unknowable, and somehow feverishly intimate.

Moving from an airy falsetto to a lower, slightly menacing coo, Jai's vocals are nimble-- but his most distinct voice is his production style, which might seem like a strange thing to say about a collection of unmastered demos. But innovation shines through their rough edges. Jai agilely deploys a unique vocabulary of pauses, crossfades, and eclectic samples; J Dilla’s Donuts, the Avalanches' Since I Left You, and Rustie’s Essential Mix all feel like aesthetic touchstones-- music that’s managed to edit the modern world's unending flow of information and voice into something cohesive and rhythmic. Still, all of those other records have a collective feel, like they're tapping into the soundtrack of a universal subconscious. What sets these songs apart is that you are always aware that there's a single human being at the center, one who oscillates between being forthcoming and shy, leaning close and then vanishing. This lends the illusion that his tracks themselves are inhaling and exhaling-- breathing symphonies of digital noise.

Jai Paul's trickle of material and meticulous secrecy projects the image of a tireless tinkerer-- someone who, like Kevin Shields, is perhaps more burdened by his talent than inclined to show it off.

The first true song in this collection, the Christmas-card-teased “Str8 Outta Mumbai”, is not only one of the most immediately exciting things Jai Paul's done, it's also very likely one of the best songs you'll hear this year. A kinetic explosion of beat-driven energy and assorted cultural references, it sounds like joyriding a stretch of Rainbow Road that cuts straight through a Bollywood set. "I don't know what to say, I don't know what to do," Jai warbles atop a sample of Vani Jairam's "Bala main bairagan hoongi". The three-minute "Mumbai" is at once dense but immediate. It gives the impression, as all of Jai’s best songs do, that you could listen a hundred times and there’d still be buried treasure to dig up.

As was the case with "BTSTU", a lot of Jai Paul's slower tracks have a seductive, vaguely sinister vibe. The third track (known to some as "Zion Wolf") opens with a weary vocal: “In the company of wolves, will I make it through the night?/ If I stay with you, I might.” It’s a brooding and passionate song-- until, suddenly, it's not. “Can I make you fall in love?” he asks at the end. A beat later, he casts the song’s intensity off with a cool shrug: “We’ll see.”

In spirit if not necessarily sound, Jai Paul's closest precedent might be Frank Ocean's patchy but explosively promising debut mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra. There's a similarity in the way both artists use clipped interstitials and weave unexpected pop culture samples into the music (the leaked tracks slyly feature snippets from both Harry Potter and "Gossip Girl"), and nod to artists you might not expect (the seventh track is an irresistible cover of Jennifer Page's 1998 bubblegum tune "Crush"). To be sure, though, there are plenty of places where the two artists diverge. In the way Ocean's story has played out, Nostalgia, Ultra now feels like it was meant to be a calling card all along: the mixtape's purpose was to show people inside and outside the industry why they should care about this guy and to promise that something greater and more polished could easily spring from Ocean's abundant font of inspiration. With Jai Paul, you're not so sure. His molasses-trickle of material and meticulous secrecy projects the image of a tireless tinkerer, someone who, like Kevin Shields, is perhaps more burdened by his talent than inclined to show it off.

Whether or not that's a front, this image is what's made his fans unusually protective of him. I've talked to people who feel guilty listening to these songs, or critics who aren't quite sure how to evaluate them. Are these demos or could they actually be the completed product? (Remember: both of Jai's official singles had an intriguingly "unfinished" quality about them.) Does the leak, if you could even call it that, help or hurt our chances of hearing Jai Paul's proper debut within the year (or the decade…)? Did he ever want us to hear this material? Are we dishonoring him by listening to it, by loving it? If the music moves us in a way that nothing else has this year, should it matter?

Nobody can say for sure-- and maybe that's the point. Jai Paul is most like Frank Ocean in that they both understand a crucial paradox about the digital era: even in the age of instant access and input overload, the poets are still the ones who know how to embrace negative space. The romantics are the ones who understand that distance and dissonance are what kindle desire, and-- even in a moment where everyone's clamoring for their 15 seconds of YouTube fame-- the most magnetic stars are the ones who can project an utter disinterest in the spotlight. And just as Ocean's zen-master internet presence has come to define the Tumblr aesthetic, Jai Paul's sound-- full of pauses, glitches, and perfectly placed sonic hyperlinks-- suggests somebody moonwalking through the overcrowded digital world with a mysterious, elegantly curated grace. All the confusion surrounding what may or may not be his debut feels oddly similar to the experience of hearing one of his songs for the first time-- a break from the modern condition that certainty is always a quick Google search away.