![]() It was super intimate and an intense period where I wrote most of the ideas for the record.” Then the pandemic hit but we had no money so we were stuck in there with no hot water. We were living in my studio because our house was leaking. The vet said he had two months and he lived for a year and half after that. This resuce, “a chunky little ginger Staffy Jack Russell cross”, contracted bladder cancer and caring for him became part and parcel of the couple’s lockdown, creating a strange and melancholic background to the creation of his new album Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities: “It was a really miserable time. Heidi isn’t their first dog they were cut up when their last dog Buster died in 2020. He says goodbye to Gemma and Heidi as they leave us to it. (If you have any biases against the idea of Superstar DJs, suffice to say, these tales would have done little to alter them.) ![]() He doesn’t dodge any questions, only really pausing to gently push a couple of particularly funny, slightly grim stories about superstar DJs off the record. He has youthful good looks, augmented with, rather than challenged by, the encroachment of silver at the temples something that has arrived with his forties. Underneath a very nice parka, supplemented with a fancy scarf, Holden is wearing the same sort of clobber that no doubt saw him through his student days a cheerful, brightly-coloured sweatshirt, jeans and DMs. Heidi, a Staffy, is a relatively recent addition to the family a ten year-old rescue dog who used to live on the street with her homeless owner until he died a year and a half ago. ![]() Holden arrives at a friendly, independent high street coffee shop in West London, with his long term partner Gemma with whom he runs label Border Community, and a dog in tow. What feels like a deeper, knottier picture begins to emerge one of optimism running bloodily and repeatedly up against reality dented and creaking but ultimately as yet unbroken utopian thinking cyclical skirmishes between self-doubt and clear-eyed innovation and fluctuating levels of faith in human nature and the concept of progress itself. I went into this interview with a secondary, less well-considered reading that Holden was a golden ager, albeit the best kind: someone who was too young and too far away from a revolutionary moment in the global counterculture – in this case the UK iteration of acid house – to experience it firsthand, but instead drew upon the notion of a platonic ideal of how things could be, how things should be, in order to create utopian art himself.Īnd after talking to him for several hours I come away convinced that this is (basically) true as well, but both perceptions intertwine to form the top layer of a more complex psychological palimpsest. It’s a fool’s game trying to apply such a sweeping narrative arc to the complexity of someone’s quarter-of-a-century long creative path, but when I mention this to Holden he nods and says, “That’s basically it!” But even if he’s not simply being polite to me, the word “basically” means, at best, it’s not really the full story. At first this happened in parallel to his mainstream career as a DJ but then became the ultimate focus of his work, with each new iteration of this interrogation feeding back into his production work, ultimately leading to the creation of some of the most invigorating ‘electronic’ music of the last decade. 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. 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. 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. ![]() ![]() There’s a reasonable reading to be made of James Holden’s musical progression to date. ![]()
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