James Holden’s career has seen him reimagine the act of electronic music-making in a decades-long journey from solitary mouseclicking towards the spirit and humanity of live, improvisational and collaborative musicianship. It’s no mean feat to capture in binary code or analogue waveform the raw and unguarded magic that happens when fingers meet keys and sticks beat skins, but Holden masterfully seizes that spark through modular synths, DIY recording methods and self-designed software. Breaking free of the shackles of grid-based and DAW-centred conventional music creation, he fashions living, breathing recordings that poke electronica’s pallid veins with a life-giving blood transfusion.
When we first interviewed Holden – all the way back in 2006 – he was using Jeskola Buzz, a free, tracker-based software environment, to write his debut album The Idiots Are Winning. If that record found the producer in something of a subversive mode, slicing and dicing the rhythms of trance and techno under his PC’s micro-edit microscope, its follow-up, The Inheritors, saw Holden flipping the script entirely, rejecting the era’s fashionably sterile minimalism in favour of deliberately disjointed timings and distorted sonics, a loose, messy and chaotic aesthetic that sounded gloriously strange and felt thrillingly human.
A decade’s passed since that release, and in the meantime, Holden’s further embraced the ethos of humanisation through a visionary collaboration with revered Moroccan instrumentalist Mahmoud Guinia that pushed the capabilities of his modular towards an improvisational synergy between traditional Gnawa music and the trance-inducing pulse of contemporary electronica. This was followed in 2017 by perhaps the apex of his career-long pursuit of musical anthropomorphism, a freewheeling and cosmic synth-jazz bacchanal recorded live in one room over ten days with (almost) no overdubs or edits, alongside a band of instrumentalists dubbed The Animal Spirits.
Holden’s latest full-length project is a starry-eyed voyage into new sonic dimensions, fittingly titled
