James Holden

More than four years have passed since that Sonar festival, when, on a sunny Catalan afternoon, we waited for a young English producer everyone was raving about: James Holden. "The Idiots Are Winning" (his first album of original productions) had already won over both audience and critics alike, and the live set met a similar fate.

But let's take things in order.

The stunning Stazione Leopolda, a slice of Berlin set down in Renaissance Florence, provides the backdrop for the sixth edition of Nextech Festival, the annual gathering of electronic music and visual environments, headlined this year by the CEO of Border Community.

Opening the night, though, is a showcase from the Romanian label [a:rpia:r]: it's down to Dan Andrei, Rhadoo and Raresh (already well regarded for "Kill the Disco"). The sets, with a very — perhaps too — techno-leaning imprint, are considerably let down by a sound system tuned like it's for a support act, and by a crowd that, as a result, prefers the atmospheric, cool open square out front to the muggy, poorly EQ'd dancefloor inside.

That is, until the faders and levels are taken over by the former enfant prodige from Devon, by now a widely recognized talent across the board: the sound system suddenly starts working as it should, and the crowd floods to the foot of the stage.

The ease with which Holden moves between styles and rhythms leaves everyone present in a permanent state of pre-orgasmic suspense — there's no predictable direction here, only the unpredictable bounce of a rugby ball.

The alternation between hypnotic, purely trance-like, chilly soundscapes and dry techno digressions detaches the crowd from any sense of time, a perpetual motion that finds itself happily disoriented with every new surge: a digital alchemist adding loops to his electro-collage, with warm arpeggiators serving as the glue holding it all together.

Every track, whether from his own productions, collaborations or remixes (his "Dj Kicks" for !k7 dates back to last year), is dissected and reassembled for the crowd's enjoyment: when the lights come up, the very last person who wants to leave is the undisputed star of the night himself, who practically has to be carried off, while the room is still demanding more vibrations to chew on.

The two-hour performance stands out for the discontinuity between what came before and what comes next, the element of discovery: what's about to happen keeps you glued to those movements, so identical to one another yet generating sounds so damn different from each other. In this, Holden is master and commander, with an aristocratically industrial taste.

Special mention goes to Werk (Piero Fragola, We Love, Bpitch Control) for the care and elegance of the video set, a complementary counterpart to the show: every memorable dinner has always had a fine wine to go with the courses.

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