James Holden - Magic Circles

The white latex of surgical gloves and the thousand colors of a kefiah hanging from a tree branch. These are the two key images that frame the extremes of James Holden's music. A twenty-year journey that takes the Exeter-born musician from Ibiza to Morocco. From beach raves to mystical encounters. And from trance music to gnawa. Placed on the covers of, respectively, At The Controls and The Animal Spirits, the two opposing visions chosen by one of the greatest talents in 21st-century electronic music encapsulate the very essence of his artistic restlessness, his being a perpetually unruly producer, only seemingly content. While the first immortalizes the gesture that precedes entry into an operating room, and so a kind of aseptic mobility, the second suggests a moment of bucolic stillness, and so the attainment of inner ecstasy. But these are just a couple of the many variations Holden has accustomed us to over time. The start of his singular trajectory dates back to 2000, with a 12" titled "Horizons", made with Buzz software and produced, of all labels, by Sony, via Silver Planet. James Holden is just nineteen years old. Yet he already shows he knows how to handle tempos and progressions. Two tracks totaling ten minutes mark a debut steeped in a still-raw progressive trance, already pregnant with a vision - halfway between cosmogony and esotericism - that would essentially become his stylistic signature, at least before the spiritual conversion that would come only fifteen years later, once he grew tired of the dancefloor, which he came to see as largely exhausting, bound by repetitive dynamics.

James Holden describes himself in many ways: producer, remixer, dj, label boss, synth maestro, band leader, sound engineer, software developer, jack-of-all-trades. These are, more or less, the many souls of a musician who, after remixing Madonna and Britney Spears, decided to devote himself body and soul to building a label capable of gathering the most unconventional electronic talents of the new millennium. Knocking at the door of Border Community were none other than Nathan Fake, Kate Wax, Fairmont. Genuine mavericks of the machines. Among the few, in those turbulent early years of the new millennium, with a vision of electronic music - in its many indietronic facets, as most called it at the time - that was both expansive and precise.

Tracks like flagship artist Nathan Fake's "The Sky Was Pink" testify to the arrival of an outgoing, damnably interesting community, one that found in guru Holden an unconventional guide, incapable of imposing himself and wide open to every new trajectory, for a dance out of step with the rest of the dance scene.

Between a new progression toward undefined space ("A Break In The Clouds") and an interstellar duet flight with Ben Pound ("Kaern Turned"), the long-awaited debut arrived in 2006. The title already says it all: The Idiots Are Winning is the EP that sets aside the temptations of the past and frames a new form of minimal egocentrism. It ranges from the looping circles of "Lump" to the parched acid techno of "Corduroy". And from the Martian isolationism of "Idiot" - almost like Klaus Dinger boarding a Soyuz - to its broken videogame textures. The Idiots Are Winning is a bold first glimpse. And it already contains the seeds of that idiosyncrasy toward the dancefloor macrocosm that would become something of a stylistic trademark for Holden in the first decade of his career.

James Alexander Goodale Holden, as the man is registered at birth, veers toward the progressive electronic sound of pioneers Didier Bocquet, Mark Shreeve, Zanov and Reinhard Lakomy, with a side helping of the less sedate Aphex Twin. While the still-twenty-something DJ cools off on the beaches of Ibiza with sets bordering on the most cerebral house, the restless visionary waiting in the wings puts together an authentic manifesto of 2000s electronic music. Or rather, one of the most spectacular mix albums of the last twenty years. Four covers that offer glimpses of as many frames of the surgeon in the operating theatre mentioned at the outset. Or rather, of his hands, clad in sterile gloves, getting ready for a gentle "cut and sew". Expressive hands, almost endowed with gazes of their own, smiling and sly as they prepare for "work". Always with one eye on the medical chart.

James Holden, now 26, driven by the corporate sound of "Balance 005", distils his critical skills and rebuilds them as a kind of expo music, dredging up everything that, in one way or another, corrupted and dazzled him over the years. And so At The Controls becomes a mix-album, one of those that have caused so much debate in the past, for present joys and sorrows or for conceptual reluctance predestined to manipulation. It's neither foolish nor pretentious to say: "Here it's different!". No, because the sound is like an inkjet printer and, while playing with the most disparate sources across years and structures, it takes on a sense of trance compactness that is genuinely surprising. You don't smell the rotten stench of the waiting body, nor the plastic essence of copy-paste jobs, but everything flows into rhythms that are remarkably understated in their grandeur. In this sense, the manipulation follows several procedures: ranging from the combined layering of multiple samples to cold, "timid" electro-scratch intrusions in an ambient setting. Different operations that converge into a single sound collage, petulant and idle, free of the self-reference that would have torn apart every single seam, leaving only a few stray threads scattered in the oblivion of distorted manipulations.

These reflections feel as if applied to a kind of accompanying "LateNightTales", since, without fear, Harmonia (the German kraut-rock group of the Seventies) is placed alongside Holden himself, passing through Apparat and Fennesz: let's say it's a mix of his own experience, fearless (and inevitably risk-free) of getting it wrong. The years running through this night are, for the most part, recent ones regardless.

At The Controls is a calendar of the year 2000 and its overlooked offspring, revisited with hairstyles fit for an event or outfits dressed for the occasion. You just need to be there to understand, listen to enjoy, "observe" to lay out your own personal regurgitations. There's an unmistakable foundational project at work, aiming to become the "Music For Airports" for ignoble times for the skies: cloudy sessions, nocturnal uproar and the danger of falling lurking in the background. The vehicle for it all is, obviously, choice. The choice to wander through parallel origins (Massive Attack, early Aphex) to create a single, unrepeatable evening: this (double) record is a concept about progressive space, stuff to make directors and viewers alike turn pale.

From the very first sequences, the young man shows signs of his tenacity, of his "elderly patience" in not needing to show everything at once; that's why his true identity, his own spaces, only emerge once the celebrations have already been underway for a while. His creations, "Lump" and "10101", are placed at the centre of the first disc, their function being to demobilize the first electronic ripples, the first signs of a trance fusion in constant ferment, in constant expansion.

Holden composes all his magnetic games with unbridled persistence, assembling and disassembling the components like a spoiled child in a hurry to satisfy his playful restlessness; and this restlessness finds a faithful desk-mate in the other outstanding offspring of the Border Community stable: Nathan Fake. In "Charlies House" all the electronic compositions create a veritable funfair of sounds and colours, a frantic inlay of childlike sketches. Once this sweet ride comes to an end, everything returns to a more adult, more reflective normality. And so the first of the two chapters closes quietly, almost in the form of contemplation: Holden chooses three tracks suited to the closing credits, with the provocative finale of "Rivers Of Sand", credited to Fennesz, some twenty seconds of underlining, errors, echoes of a low-fi that will exist twenty years from now.

The second disc opens with the vibrations of a shock, rummaging through those fine things that resemble the techno of Juan Atkins: worlds gripped by hisses, rhythms outlined by single-cell organisms, primitive interludes. His "interventions" load up the edges rather than the centres, and everything ultimately circles back to a kaleidoscope of ballrooms from long ago. What leaves you stunned is the ability to suddenly rein in the instincts of alternating movements, presenting a parenthesis of apparent calm and twisting the highly effective folk of Malcolm Middleton ("Solemn Thirsty"). The music seems to ask for a bit of rest, obtaining it with the comfort of a state of mind that knows it never really pushed it away. Yes, because the evident trait here, circling back to what's already been said, is precisely the relaxation that lingers in the air, even in some of its accelerations. And there's no better moment to pull out "Xtal", that is, the origin of a certain way of understanding revolutions.

The art of the dj-kicks, of the homespun dj-set, amid the carcasses of worn-out vinyl and carefully guarded samples, carries on undaunted amid guest spots on the bills of summer festivals across half the continent, while the tendency toward any form of self-indulgent music-geek mannerism remains constantly lurking around the corner. Dj-Kicks doesn't betray expectations and condenses the cravings of Holden the "club rat". Just take a look at the tracks chosen for the occasion to feel welcomed every time. The manipulator blends the impossible: from the ever-present Snaith and Hebden — true guiding lights for the still-young artist — to Piano Magic, passing through his friend Luke Abbott and techno legend James Ruskin.

In short, not a single track feels out of place. Everything turns beautifully according to the mood of the moment. So, Mogwai's "The Sun Smells Too Loud" collapses into a commotion of atonal propulsions, dispersing its energies in drips. The "soft" Piano Magic are seamlessly fused into the introductory tick-tock ("Wintersport/Cross Country"), while the mutant disco-music of William T. Burnett aka Grackle presses on cybernetically. The walls shake as Mordant Music's "Olde Wobbly" goes by, before the trance-space alignment finds its hypnotic axis in the Maserati/Caribou pairing, placed one after the other in a well-organized clot of programmed beats and glitch inserts.

Closing things out are the Tolkien-esque cosmic-synth of the little-known Didier Pacquette, made even more ancestral by good old James, and the noise upheaval of SS Pyramid Snake, confirming the elusive, selective nature of a master of modular software and effect-driven collage.

James Holden is no longer a kid splitting his time between mathematics studies and the most refined form of djing. Even The Idiots Are Winning now seems like a distant memory. Between one set and another, Holden has remarkably honed his skill at the controls. But above all, he proves he has by now become a man. Or rather, the man of the dj-set. The master of effect-laden patchwork. A wild ball bouncing through the best venues in Europe, able to floor bulls and cows alike with jaw-dropping manipulations and laptop money-shots. And yet, for far too long, the talent from Exeter lacked that album repeatedly conceived but never truly committed to tape.

Inheritors thus gathers the best sonic intuitions sniffed out by good old James over the course of these seven years spent practically at the best electronic outposts on the planet. To give some kind of shape to this, his second full-length over the long haul, the musician had to come to terms with his own stubborn (and blessed) artistic impulsiveness, recording the individual tracks almost live, while still refusing to abandon his role as craftsman of an electronic sound mystified always to his own liking, one that evolves and thrashes about punctually between present and past.

The precious legacy left to us by the German electronic pioneers thus takes on an at times overriding centrality. Holden thus reactivates motorik ("Rannoch Dawn") and gathers spatial debris scattered across his own boundless sonic galaxy ("Sky Burial"). He clings tightly to his own capsule and lands on his own runway, pumping away with wit, exploding rhythmically in the finale in the manner of a more energized Hebden ("Renata"). At the same time, he plays at being the third-worldist visionary on "A Circle Inside A Circle" or the android in the album's central section, see the impalpable "The Illuminations", as well as the cosmic abstractions of "Inter-City 125" and the lopsided irregularity of "Seven Stars".

But James Holden is first and foremost a tailor of the beat, and the title track alone showcases all his mastery in bringing together alienated trance and gutsy electro-scratch. The following "Some Respite" tries to soften the tones, almost seeking a point of contact between the most spontaneous manipulation and the need to contort itself by bypassing convention, amid psych branches and convoluted digressions.

At the end, a certain awareness resurfaces ("Blackpool Late Eighties"), expressed through a soft, slow-paced four-on-the-floor bounce, mixed with a synthetic ascent very much in the vein of Meta.83 and Motiivi:Tuntematon.

Inheritors is a damnably impulsive record, rhythmically elusive, deliberately "raw" and dirty. It's the manifesto of a producer projected well beyond his usual boundaries, totally immersed in his own parallel universe thick with trance progressions, synthetic sequences, spacey debris and slippery electronic pirouettes.

Between a selection mix for Resident Advisor and a microhouse mix for Texture, the indefatigable English jack-of-all-trades suddenly veers toward spiritualism. It's an inclination strengthened by numerous trips to India and Morocco. Holden hones his natural pull toward an expansive stillness, which also surfaces in the many new age shades that seep like undertows into his tracks. In the middle of the journey of our life, to borrow from Dante, he's gripped by a need that pulls him definitively away from clubbing and leads him, like a new Deuter, toward the light of the transcendent, of the body chasing after the spirit. A new phase sets in, bringing ethnic instrumentation alongside the machines and software.

 

The first stop on this new journey comes in two parts, made alongside his longtime friend Luke Abbott. Outdoor Museum Of Fractals/555HZ contains two tributes to the father of American minimalism, Terry Riley. The record was in fact unveiled during the celebrations at the Barbican Hall in London for the American composer's eightieth birthday.

The first half of the record features Camilo Tirado on tabla, and it's a long trip that joins the bare-bones essence of early progressive electronic music with Indian tribalism. The thirty-two minutes of "555Hz", whose main loop is set, fittingly, to a frequency of 555Hz, are pure levitation in the style of Florian Fricke. It's the piece that marks a total break from the past. The need to soar over unfamiliar traditions, over worlds hitherto alien, in order to slot fresh suggestions into his own music, is vented in Holden's constant "wandering" - the way he takes long sabbaticals, so to speak, stopping here and there in search of the perfect spiritual calling. What captures his attention above all is Morocco, with its rich trove of ancient traditions. It's a journey that grips him to the point of steering his idea of sound toward something even further "other", especially when set against the electronic patchworks stitched together so sparingly in the past.

So, no more minimal scraps, spatial temptations, acid leanings. Gone too is much of the kraut influence and the high-voltage electronic grime heard on the blinding The Inheritors, with the man cast as a pied piper endlessly searching for some possible astral conjunction between past and present. What's more, the English producer seems to have momentarily set aside the temptations sniffed out through his collaboration with Luke Abbott.

And so, a year after Outdoor Museum Of Fractals/555HZ, the founder of Border Community resurfaces together with his trusted The Animal Spirits, tuning his combinatory art to this formation of real weight and world-jazz leanings, made up of Marcus Hamblett, Liza Bec, Lascelle Gordon, Etienne Jaumet and the great Tom Page on drums. We're faced, then, with a blending of intents that reshuffles the cards on the performing level, but which in some ways continues the deep artistic search Holden himself has pursued in recent times; a "new" earthly dimension, glimpsed in small doses during the various live performances of his 2013 masterpiece, and which projects him, through the various tracks of this fourth record, somewhere between the charges of Gong's "You" - touching down on Earth after the long journey on the planet of the same name - ("Pass Through The Fire") and symphonies out of the most ancient Maghrebi shamanism ("Thunder Moon Gathering"). It's hardly surprising, after all, that over the last four years what's caught the attention of the Exeter-born musician has been the gnawa music of the late, lamented Mahmoud Guinia. Meanwhile, the album is once again born of a single, grueling live session recorded without overdubs or edits.

Enriching the record's various spiritual-jazz-leaning passages with micro-reflections of the gnawa style is the perfectly judged modular layer, set in the title track as a counterweight to the sax outpourings supplied by the excellent Jaumet and to the ever-urgent, "wild" rhythm section; a crescendo that attests to the soundness of the operation and best captures the stylistic mark Holden has reached on this new path of his.

That said, while showing an excellent command of this instrumental universe, repeated listens raise some legitimate doubts about how stable this new direction really is, and at certain points a touch of harmless mannerism creeps in. Certainly, Holden and his animal spirits do everything they can to lead the listener into the beating heart of this new oasis. The non-place of the past is now a usable, perceivable space. Still, the choice to lean on certain folk traditions ultimately proves less powerful and less disarming than the proverbial, at times spectacularly trance-inflected electronics of the first half of his career. What's missing is that pinch of healthy madness, the upheaval, the stunning, supreme spark reached on what still remains his absolute masterpiece, the acclaimed The Inheritors.

The vividly colored giant kefiah immortalized on the album's striking cover, with which the artist has figuratively wrapped his new project, fully expresses the work's inner soul. And setting aside a few due reservations about how the operation ultimately pans out, the candor with which Holden reveals this new inclination remains rare currency, especially when set against so many other flash-in-the-pan productions today, resting on the same exotic terrain but often in a perpetually self-satisfied way. Which is no small thing at all.

 

In 2019, Holden composed the score for Christopher Kelly's documentary A Cambodian Spring, centered on a conflict over development plans for Boeung Kak lake in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. It's an experiment blending minimalism and new age into small vignettes, created by Holden for Kelly's footage, which gives back little when listened to in isolation, detached from the documentary's images. Still, there are small flashes of light here and there, as in the very brief "Solidarity Theme (Villagers)".

 

The collaborations with Swiss accordionist Mario Batkovic, Polish clarinetist Waclaw Zimpel, Moroccan gnawa master Maalem Houssam Guinia and his late father Maalem Mahmoud Guinia keep Holden's mystical approach alive and expanding. He reaches a destination all his own in 2023. To hell with the gadgetry of technology. Away with GPS, smartphones, cameras. Away too with airlines, low-cost flights, paid-for tour guides. For James Holden it's time to look in the mirror, close his eyes and fly right into it. The London-based multi-instrumentalist, producer and disc jockey opens himself up to every other possibility. To be precise: a high-dimensional space of all possibilities. Not bad, right? Because Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities is a one-way ticket. And the invitation the musician extends to listeners along for the ride makes that much clear.

The work thus presents itself as an odyssey of sounds, rhythms and horns lined up as far as the eye can see. Holden captures a piece of it with every movement to chart "uncharted" routes. The compass, naturally, is the background he's built up over twenty years of dazzling excursions between entertainment-oriented electronic music and its more cerebral counterpart. Between the raves of Ibiza and the dunes of the Sahara. Between a cosmopolitan pull and an interstellar drift.

Inside the twelve "stops" of Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities there's a whole lot going on: computer, synthesizers, organ, violin, piano, tabla, guitar, gong, bells. But above all there's the desire to let go, toward an imaginary universe. A destination whose figurative check-in point is the circle of characters gathered by Jorge Velez on the cover. "I wanted," Holden says, "this to be my most open record, not cynical, naive, defenseless - basically the album I wanted to make as a teenager." He adds: "I used to balance my clock radio on top of a wardrobe to pick up the faint FM signals of pirate stations from the nearest city, dreaming about what raves would be like once I could finally escape and become a new age traveller."

 

New age, then. And here another universe is worth mentioning. Parallel, of course. Those planets James Holden has explored over the years, moving from the expanses of Terry Riley to the waves of Aphex Twin. But one could also bring in some lesser-known oases. In short, ports of call rarely visited. It would be worth fishing out of that space a few records that, like Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities, will always carry that so-called gift of ubiquity within the more or less experimental electronic landscape. Here are a few, already mentioned earlier, from submerged eras: "Voyage cérébral" by Didier Bocquet, "Firemusic" by Mark Shreeve, "Silver Apples Of The Moon" by Morton Subotnick, "Synthesist" by Harald Grosskopf, "Beam-Scape" by Peter Mergener and Michael Weisser. And, to close, "Der Traum von Asgard" by Reinhard Lakomy.

But let's get back to Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities. To its essence. To what Holden wants to put out into the world. To the travel document mentioned above. Starting with the crew, made up of members of the live incarnation of Animal Spirits: longtime drummer friend Tom Page, percussionist Camilo Tirado, jack-of-all-trades Marcus Hamblett, on double bass and guitar for the occasion, and saxophonist Christopher Duffin (Xam Duo and Virginia Wing). All aboard together, passionately, to string together sensations drawn from the most scattered corners. It ranges from the shamanic evocations of "The Answer Is Yes", which recall the digitized fantasy of Popol Vuh's "Spirit Of Peace" phase, to the ambient suspension alternating with metallic thuds of "Infinite Fadeout". And from the Berlin school-leaning progressions of "Trust Your Feet" to the frame-less videogame feel of "You Can Never Go Back". On "Contains Multitudes", James Holden goes even further, crafting a dancefloor-ready variant of A.G. Cook's pc music.

 

In the '70s, Georg Deuter moved to India, to Poona, to transform into Chaitanya Hari, thus becoming a neo-Sannyasin, a disciple of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, better known as Osho, and to discover, in the end, that, after all, "silence is the answer". For James Holden, shedding his skin was simpler: all it took was reflecting on himself to give rise to a new awareness.

"The album," he states further in the press release, "is full of things I've come to terms with: I've always hated the call of a wood pigeon, synonymous with the endless boredom of suburban weekends. Even though I learned both piano and violin, I've never used them on my records. I'm embarrassed by my playing and put off by their connotations, but I'm glad both are there. And for a while, from the mid-2010s onward, I couldn't listen to dance music anymore. Just the kick drum would make me jump for the skip button, but I found my way back to it, reclaiming the parts I loved: the hypnotism, the utopianism, the broad cross-cultural freedom. To finally leave behind what I don't need."

 

*Thanks to Angelo Franzese for contributing to "At The Controls"

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

Share on

This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition