Herb Sundays 156: James Holden [Season 9 Finale]
An actual Sunday from one of our great living musicians. "now i have plenty of sundays, but feel strong existential panic at the idea of making a playlist. so i tricked myself..."
Herb Sundays 156: James Holden
Playlist: Apple Music, Spotify.
Art by Michael Cina
“when i was good at making playlists, a professional at it even, i didn't really get enough sundays to know what to do with them [SV4 Editor’s Note: translation - As a retired globetrotting DJ, I think James is saying Sundays were for sleep or travel home]. now i have plenty of sundays, but feel strong existential panic at the idea of making a playlist. so i tricked myself - this one is more a documentary than a playlist:
our real sunday, june 1st. the filter coffee was medium roast from sham land supermarket, the weed was a strain called 'conspiracy theory' that came from the internet (lol) and our discussions (if you want to play along at home) included kompakt nostalgia, pickles and beans as a butt biome perfect storm, posting anxiety, the cringe embarassment of seeing the producer's hand in a record and why must our dog bark at us when we try to chill.
our digital music library is (i think) the only material possession i really value and in this house random play rules with an iron fist. sometimes i put albums on but trusting fate's path through a good library is usually better. you're allowed to skip, and the neccessity of this engagement keeps you present. the library is peppered with a few surviving 00's dance promos for this purpose like how fox-turds on the pavement keep your walks mindful.
half way through i went to the studio to tinker with something but the same libary is at the studio too so the playlist continued.
total skip count: 147
- James Holden for Herb Sundays
James Holden has lived more than a few lives already. As an instant wunderkind in notoriously close-minded dance music circles, he slipped the noose of musical pigeonholing to establish his own voice in the decades that have followed. Arriving with an over-the-eye haircut straight outta Erol Alkan’s Trash club night (1997-2007), and that remaining cosmic twinkle in his visage, Holden’s youth era has given way to the the drapey sweaters of a gray-streaked explorer, one always following his own muse, a pastoral modernism, sometimes misunderstood, but always returning home.
I had asked James for a Herb entry over two years back, it was a must. We’ve had a nice dialogue over this Millenium with DJ charts and such and Ghostly alumni Solvent remixing Kate Wax for Border Community, etc. but I was thrilled when he finally relented. There is too much Holden to cover for one post, but Laura Lewis for The Quietus in 2023, sets it up nicely:
There’s a reasonable reading to be made of James Holden’s musical progression to date. It goes something like this: with all the idealism, energy, rapidly-crystalising intelligence and wide-eyed naivety of his late teenage years, James Holden started producing trance records which were enhanced rather than hindered by the fact he had grown up geographically and socially isolated from the major hubs of European dance music culture. This culminated in a remix which helped shift the course of dance music and cemented for him what looked like a career as a big name DJ, remixer and producer. But, instead of simply galvanising his position, with a first class ticket on a gravy train for life, he began an excavation into the deeper etymological layers of the word ‘trance’ in order to apply lessons learned to his own practice.
Indeed, Holden arrived seemingly fully formed as a teen, producing a hit “Horizons” while simultaneously being acknowledged as a a great DJ too, known for harmonic mixing “in key” which gave him both a serious and romantic reputation, and thrust him into the conversation of turn-of-the century Trance and “Progressive House” circles. Herb readers will know we are Trance enthusiasts around here, the good kind at least, and no one has put more respect on the T-word than Holden, even though he left behind clubland, and traditional dance music, many moons ago.
After a disappointing experience releasing with others, he formed the Border Community label in 2003 as a erstwhile collective for other melodic misfits that sat between genres. Again Holden’s musical vision was spot on, with the first couple years of the label slotting in perfectly into post-Trance ‘00s and mixing into record boxes alongside more cosmopolitan “minimal” Techno the likes of Kompakt (see Herb 67, Michael Mayer) helped mainstream.
The BC sound became a calling card somewhere between euphoric but tough dance music and UK country-side ambient, packaged in the gorgeous Tom Horner designed sleeves, which felt like a more psychedelic Julian Opie. A wonkier take on big room dance music, that pleased many because it felt honest. As he told Gerd Jansen for RBMA in 2010 about that landmark remix of Nathan Fake: “The point of the remix was that it stayed back a bit, there wasn’t a snare roll, it didn’t quite deliver in the breakdown, it didn’t quite drop right back in, it took a while, it was a bit awkward sounding. That’s what keeps it from being just a trance record or whatever, like cheap.”
This also dovetailed with his double mix CD for the Balance series (read the rabid YouTube Reviews for a taste of the fanfare) which ended up being rated #6 in Resident Advisor’s best DJ Mixes of the 00’s list: “James Holden's aversion to stasis and dedication to doing things his own way would see him carve a wholly unique career path for himself. It all started with Balance 005, which launched his brand of shoegazing progtrance to the world. Using as-yet unknown Border Community stalwarts like Nathan Fake, Petter and Avus to craft an epic trip deftly balanced on the difficult line between commercial viability and experimentation, Balance 005 would be a career-defining moment of unsurpassable glory for most other DJs. For the young enigma, though, it was just a nice way of kicking things off.”
That same moment got Holden remix spots for Madonna (an amazing one) and for Britney Spears (Herb 154, Jeff Weiss is probably somewhere nodding approvingly). Though it wasn’t officially released but you can see how it charts an alternate path for pop. It charts a course for an alternate world of pop (maybe similar to The DFA’s unreleased Britney cut), a stilted trance sound that reconsiders and messes with trad pop conceits in its vocal reproduction, something that fits alongside Herb 08 Carl Craig’s delicious mid-’00s imperial run era for all who can hear, but back to the story.
Indeed, Holden would slide further from the dancer’s view with each subsequent release forging space very few other musicians in his lane have been able to. His run starting with The Inheritors (2013) form a cosmic split, deeper into kraut/kosmiche, but never false. He maybe is on a similar but inverse path of Four Tet, who started in more a post-rocky space and now dabbles (willingly and with great fun) at big festivals, equally earnest. I’ve often thought of his retreat as a way of keeping his personal flame lit. As a wide-eyed kid who found dance music at home, as a music not a scene, he became disillusioned by the realities of DJ life and clubland, needing to go back to the source. “Although at least today the kids have Boiler Room, so they can see first-hand that clubs are shit” he told Loud And Quiet.
Indeed Holden’s imagination was formed far away from the club and as a teen he managed to have a rave experience albeit an abnormal one. As L&Q wrote in 2023: “With restrictive parents who prohibited Radio 1 and ITV at home, and inspired by the tales of free raves trickling through the morally panicked mid-’90s media that inadvertently made them sound like the most appealing adventures going, Holden became sure of his one true path. His mind was only further solidified when, aged 16, he started covertly going to hippie-run raves in community centres and forests in his native Leicestershire, long after the more headline-grabbing parties had been clamped down by John Major’s Tory government, but still where that culture endured…”
This marriage of imagination, and of nature, set him on a path (“when I was a teenager, I was fully convinced I was going to buy an old army truck and just be a new-age traveller”) that puts him in a grand tradition of Great British Utopianists, maybe in league with folks like Andrew Weatherall or the magical powers of an Alan Moore, I’m sure he’d chafe at both suggestions. But listening to this podcast interview helmed by the great
, one that pushed my fandom for Holden into the red, it all clicked. Covering all manner of topics from making his synths and software be able to respond and keep up with live musicians and more.2025 finds Holden in his pocket with a new album and new performances.
interviewed Holden and Polish clarinetist Wacław Zimpel’s this past week about their new album, The Universe Will Take Care Of You (Border Community). “The pair channeled their shared influences of krautrock and Indian classical on their new record, The Universe Will Take Care of You, came out last Friday. It’s in the running for album of the year for us. It’s a collection of ecstatic freeform electroacoustic pieces, with Zimpel improvising over Holden’s homemade synthesizers.”FS: What krautrock records influenced you, and what about that music speaks to you?
WZ: For me these are mostly Can records. I also love some other stuff by Holger Czukay. And I am a big fan of the Jacki Liebzeit concept of the rhythm.
JH: discovering krautrock was a huge moment for me, specifically and particularly the cluster/harmonia end of it more than the can/duul/faust end, though that's awesome too. it seemed like the music i was always looking for - as warm and rich as the early trance stuff i've always loved but so much freer and trippier.
Indeed it is this pursuit of the timeless that makes Holden a living great. Forever seeking the ecstatic truth in the music. Or as
wrote for Pitchfork:“Less a single than an extended instrumental jam, the six-and-a-half minute “Pass Through the Fire” is a nervy squiggle of brokedown crunchy psychedelia. Drawing on musical sensibilities borrowed from the late Moroccan musician Mahmoud Guinia (with whom Holden collaborated in 2014), live drums pound out an insistent polyrhythm, while synths fizzle, woodwinds howl, and a horn section hiccups its way to a ramshackle but soulful crescendo. While it’s hard not to feel like “Fire” could have benefitted from a touch of Holden’s producerly slickness, the end result sounds uncommonly alive, and suggests that his current headspace is much more man than machine.”
Indeed, some of Holden’s best work isn’t his most popular. The aforementioned sessions with the late Maalem Houssam Guinia form some of the most important “electronic” music of our time. No small feat, but just another adventure for James.
I have to admit I didn't know much about his work until today. Class is in session... all links clicked. Bravo, thank you.
The Holden's Balance DJ-set is one of my all-time favorite DJ-mix.