James Holden
Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities
★★★★
BORDER COMMUNITY. CD/DL/LP
The psychedelic optimism of old rave, revisited!
AN ELECTRONIC music producer with an elevated taste for the psychedelic, Holden’s explorations over the past 20 years have incorporated spiritual jazz, Moroccan gnawa, Radiohead hook-ups and loads of kosmische into his perpetual quest for the transcendent. His fourth solo album, though, channels those energies back into an ecstatic update on classic techno. The “High Dimensional Spaces” often pleasingly resemble the hippier end of early-’90s UK rave culture – Club Megadog vets will be transported – while the sax on Common Land is more 808 State and chillout room than Pharoah Sanders. Still, that remains inspiring music, and amidst the endless arpeggios and Utopian good vibes, there’s a sense Holden is finding retrofitted tools to articulate his own progressive vision. Hence the outstanding Worlds Collide Mountains Form, an electrofolk-drone ritual that picks up where 2017’s notionally more organic The Animal Spirits left off.