Forty Minutes Of James Holden

September. Sigh. 

James Holden has been making records since the late 90s. In the early 2000s he was heralded for a while as the new wunderkind when his remix of Nathan Fake sent lots of people into a spin. He backed away a little and made several albums and numerous other singles and EPs that were solely his vision. His three solo albums- 2006's The Idiots Are Winning, 2013's The Inheritors and 2023's Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities- are all hugely impressive and engaging, inventive pieces of work, records that move the head, the feet and the soul. 

Forty Minutes of James Holden

• The Sky Was Pink (James Holden Remix)
• The Caterpillar's Intervention
• Idiot
• Blackpool Late Eighties
• In The End You'll Know
• Common Land

Back in 2004 (twenty years ago!) electronic music was over a decade on from the acid house revolution that shook up so many people and two decades on from Detroit techno's pioneers. The early 21st century saw a lot of the forward progression of the previous two decades arc falter. Guitar bands were back. Indie sleeze, electro- clash, mash ups and whatever else had pushed their way to the fore. Nathan Fake's The Sky Was Pink came out in August 2004 and proved that there were still places where electronic music was twitching and looking to the future. James Holden's remix is a magnificent piece of electronic sound, percussion and drums, synths and FX, minimal and progressive, echoes of Aphex Twin and Warp in the 90s but different too. Nine and a half minutes of brilliance. 

The Caterpillar's Intervention is from james Holden's second album, 2013's The Inheritors and has saxophone from Etienne Jaumet of Zombie Zombie. The album was inspired by a 1953 William Golding novel, set at the time when homo sapiens began to replace and outdo their neanderthal predecessors. Neolithic rock art adorns the sleeve. Some of the music on the album sounds like neolithic folk music could have sounded 10, 000 years ago. There are modular synthesisers, acoustic/ electro dynamics, drones and ramshackle drums, rhythms and melodies switching around, nothing ever staying quite where you might expect to, with the sax riding its discordant path on top. Blackpool Late Eighties is from the same album, an utterly superb piece of music, definitely nodding to Richard D. James, but Holden's own thing too, building slowly with a keyboard line on the top that gradually becomes the focus, unfolding and soaring like a murmuration. It sounds nothing like Blackpool in the late eighties either. 

Idiot is from James' full length debut album, The Idiots Are Winning, the track a seven minute centrepiece- repetition, distorted synths, buzzing synths that make the synapses twitch, electronic impulses flickering around.  

On 2023's Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities Holden constructed an organic, sublime, dream of an album, one that looked back to the free party and New Age traveller rave of the 90s (a scene that was possibly the true underground of that decade), the pastoral techno of FSOL and The KLF's Chill Out, 90s ambient music, and used all of this - modular synths, rave sounds, bird song, sax, piano and field sounds, tabla and the influence of 70s cosmische groups like Popul Voh, to make one of the best albums of last year. It's massively emotive music too- a 21st century dream of a rave utopia.