This is a pandemic dance record like no other. At the start of his career, British producer James Holden skewed trance, then techno, garnering acclaim for his remixes. He has since spent two fascinating albums exploring different paths to flow states, increasingly incorporating analogue instruments, cosmic jazz and Moroccan gnawa, while still adapting his own analogue synth rigs.
His fourth album returns to the dancefloor, integrating all that has gone before. Too young for the illicit sound system era, Holden has created the vintage rave soundtrack he wishes had existed when he was a teenager, dreaming of free party transcendence. It’s a sense of yearning mirrored by the album’s creation during the scary days of lockdown when musicians’ incomes evaporated.
The result is magnificent: “dance” music that bursts out of the grid with retro textures, prelapsarian oscillations, birdsong and bells. Tracks such as the nine-minute Contains Multitudes set the mood, while titles such as Common Land nod at the political subtexts of the free party movement. Holden’s aesthetic spreads its arms wide though. Continuous Revolution is a trance workout full of icy synths and Worlds Collide Mountains Form is powered by folk-adjacent drones. High Dimensional Space is a preset-free iteration of EDM in which repetitive elements contrast with generative practices, ritualistic wig-outs with playful found sounds.
