Jamie Woon is a special talent who will carve his blues 'n' garage infused future pop songs into your brain and leave them there forever. It's music that will get people talking, made by the guitar wielding singer/songwriter and producer. You might not have heard of him yet – unless you've been tapped into the eerie, soulful end of dubstep or perhaps if you were a regular at One Taste, an acoustic night that took over festival stages at Secret Garden and Glastonbury in the late 2000s. If you'd been looking carefully, though, you might have noticed that Woon was one of the participants at the acclaimed Red Bull Music Academy in Barcelona 2008. The academy invites 60 up and coming DJs, musicians and producers from around the world to the month-long event where they are tutored by musical legends like Sly and Robbie and make tunes with the studio team - who that year included drum 'n' bass don DJ Zinc, Sa-Ra's Om'Mas Keith, D'Angelo producer Russ Elevado and Mark 'Global Communications' Pritchard. The academy has thrown up a tonne of talent over the ten years it's been going: Flying Lotus, Mr Hudson, Hudson Mohawke, J-Wow from Buraka Som Sistema and a whole host of others. This experience helped build on the fragile, atmospheric music he was making with a LoopStation, opening his eyes to the heavy new sound of Woon 2010. Two releases emerged from the musical collaborations that were born at the academy: he released 'Solidify' with electronics girl Subeena on Planet Mu, quickly followed by the twisted G-Funk of 'I'm Going Wit You' by Debruit featuring Om'Mas Keith. But you have to go back a few years to find the seeds of his new sound. In 2007 he released his version of traditional standard 'Wayfaring Stranger' with a remix from ultra-selective dubstep producer Burial on the flip. It turned people like Gilles Peterson and Mary-Anne Hobbs into full-blown Woon fans, but the release also recalibrated his musical mind. It sent him on a journey which forced him to learn and unlearn everything he knew, and took him to this place where he's primed to be one of the most exciting artists you're likely to hear all year; a man who is populist but always inventive, a modest and understated 27 year old who's making hugely ambitious music that you'll be filing, typically idiosyncratically, between your favourite Four Tet, Richard Hawley and D'Angelo records. The new sound, fuses his future pop songs with '80s reverb, ultra-tight beats and acres of bass. "I love atmosphere," he says. "I'm a fan of really deep sub bass that isn't swamped by other sounds. There's always enough room for some twinkly stuff on top and this big cavern, for the voice." The new songs, like 'Night Air' or the future bossa-nova of 'Tomorrow' or the Radiohead-go-soulful undertones of 'Street' carry the intimate emotions of his early sound into a whole different room; bigger, badder… heavier. Singer, songwriter and self-taught producer Woon made his name by playing live. He's got hundreds and hundreds of gigs under his belt, from endless spots in front of the microphone with just his guitar, an effects box and that unmistakable voice, to supporting Amy Winehouse. He's played in a full band with dubstep DJ and producer Reso on drums and he's taken stage at Sonar. You might say it's in his blood: his mother is Scottish folk legend Mae McKenna, a lady who did session vocals for a massive list of stars including Bjork, Michael Jackson and the aforementioned Kylie. Woon's influences are similarly colourful. He namechecks nu-disco king Todd Terje and 2010 future garage hotshots James Blake ("he's a beast") and Mount Kimbie . He's a fan of '90s R'n'B as well as the folk and soul stuff you'd expect, and Cajun blues master JJ Cale, a man he describes as 'the original bedroom musician'. Woon likes to take the soul lineage back to its roots: "I like people who find different ways of doing the blues. It's at the root of all popular music. Blues and bass - that's the real hybrid." He has now made the music that will let him switch between intimate gigs to stages with a bigger reach. "I want to play to more people and I want to play in bigger places. I want to be able to do absolutely anything I want - no constraints." Basically, and bassically, he's doing things his way. Always.
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