Jamie Lidell is a Brighton-born Berliner whose Motown-style vocals and modern production made Multiply (Warp) one of the most critically acclaimed albums of this past year: electronic music bible XLR8R magazine named him “Artist of the Year.” Merging electronic beats and sounds with those of classic soul, Lidell has created a new future-retro R&B; that simultaneously evokes and revitalizes the sound of a bygone era.

I’d heard that Multiply was originally supposed to be released as a CD and DVD package, and after watching Lidell perform at the M3 (Miami Music Multimedia) conference in Miami, I understood why. Live, the songs take on a completely different form, as Lidell performs them alone, sampling and looping his own voice, gradually creating a complex live multitrack accompaniment. No guitars, no drums—heck, no other people. And no repetition—the set changes every single time he performs it.

I met Lidell after his performance. Over the blare of a thumping house soundtrack, we sat at the Raleigh Hotel’s poolside café. I haven’t had a chance to do any fact checking on this, but I suspect we were the two tallest, skinniest, and pasty-white-iest people in all of Florida.

—Baron Von Luxxur

THE BELIEVER: So what do you think of Miami?

JAMIE LIDELL: It’s an excessive place. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much…

BLVR: … skin?

JL: Yeah, a certain kind of plastic.

BLVR: But you’ve been to L.A.

JL: Yeah, but even that felt a bit more—I mean, it always happens around beach resorts, a certain kind of money gravitates to the scene. The gold goes to the water. People love to wear it, show it off, roll with it. For me, I just find it disgusting. I can’t laugh at it after a while. It’s actually just decadence—it’s just fucked. And I wonder how people get to that stage where they can afford it: how do they afford all these Range Rovers and Hummers and this and that? They’re expensive things! I can’t afford shit. I haven’t got anything and I don’t really care, but if I wanted it, I couldn’t get it. Someone was telling me it’s all on credit.

BLVR: Yes, we Americans do that rather well.

JL: I was thinking, if I had to cruise down this strip, if I had to take me as an individual to a decadent level, what would I go for, what would my car be? And I don’t know! I used to be into that when I was a kid, I was obsessed—“Look at that Ferrari!” Why the hell does that mean so much when we’re younger?

BLVR: I guess it represents power, because you don’t have any when...