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James Holden: "I got really bored of making

music. But the moment I discovered
modular and Live and Max/MSP, it all
opened up again"
By Matt Mullen ( Computer Music, Future Music ) published 31 December 2023

Two decades into his career, James Holden is still searching for
new ways to make electronic music sound human. We visit him in
his West London studio

(Image credit: Laura Lewis)

Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that floated your
boat this year.

Best of 2023: James Holden’s career has seen him embark on a decades-long
journey from solitary mouse-clicking towards the spirit and humanity of live,
improvisational and collaborative musicianship, reimagining the act of
electronic music-making in the process.

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,
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but Holden seizes that spark through modular synths, DIY recording methods
and self-designed software. Breaking free of the shackles of grid-bound, DAW-
centred music creation, he fashions living, breathing productions 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.

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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, MOST POPULAR MOST SHARED

its follow-up, The Inheritors, saw him flipping the script entirely, rejecting the
era’s fashionably sterile minimalism in favour of deliberately disjointed timings 1 "I have tremendous problems
with some of my own tunes,
and distorted sonics, a loose, messy and chaotic aesthetic that sounded unless they’re particularly
brilliantly strange and felt thrillingly human. simple": Remembering the
musical mind, self-
A decade’s passed since that release, and in the meantime, Holden’s further
deprecation and wisdom of
embraced the ethos of humanization through a visionary collaboration with Allan Holdsworth
revered Moroccan musician Mahmoud Guinia that pushed the capabilities of his
modular towards an improvisational synergy between traditional Gnawa music
and the pulse of trance-inducing electronica. This was followed in 2017 by 2 “Every time I opened a music
paper it said, ‘Johnny Marr –
perhaps the apex of his career-long pursuit of musical anthropomorphism, a jingle jangle’. I'd just had
freewheeling and cosmic synth-jazz bacchanal recorded live in one room over enough”: How The Smiths
ten days with (almost) no overdubs, alongside a band of instrumentalists defied expectations on their
dubbed The Animal Spirits. final album, Strangeways,
Here We Come
Holden’s latest full-length project is a starry-eyed voyage into new sonic
dimensions, fittingly titled Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All
Possibilities. A joyfully acid-tinged campfire synth-along, the record finds Holden 3 "This guitar is stunning to
look at, a joy to play and has
pairing hallucinatory electronics - sounds produced by a modular rig, broken
the tone to boot": Epiphone
Prophet-600 and custom sequencing and synthesis environment, designed in Joe Bonamassa 1963 SG
Max/MSP and housed in a 3D-printed computer - with a riot of live Custom review
instrumentation contributed by the man himself (drums, piano, a childhood
violin) and a varied cast of collaborators.
 Get the MusicRadar Newsletter 4 “I'm kind of a formalist as far
as songwriting and guitar
parts go, and I'm a way better
Want all the hottest music and gear news, reviews, deals, features and
rhythm guitar player than I
more, direct to your inbox? Sign up here. am a soloist:” 5 of Peter
Buck's greatest R.E.M. guitar
Your Email Address SIGN ME UP moments

5
Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands "I’m telling you, I have a hit
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the world for the longest time
By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and if you don’t give this to
and are aged 16 or over. me, I have another company
that will!”: Triple-neck guitars,
modern-day cowboys and the
story of Bon Jovi's Wanted
Dead Or Alive
Once laid down in marathon live takes,
recordings were scissored and  Both musician and machine-
stitched together in software before builder, for Holden these two
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being piped through a circularly practices are inextricably
arranged, ragtag assortment of linked
speakers and recorded once more,
essentially mixed down in physical
space. The record’s twelve sprawling tracks recall by turns the motorik thud of
krautrock and the jaw-swinging fervour of ‘90s rave, the unrehearsed brio of folk
music and the dizzying anarchy of free jazz, chillout's uncanny drift and
kosmiche's interstellar twinkle, all the while preserving the mesmeric arpeggios
that have stimulated Holden's music from the very beginning.

Both musician and machine-builder, for Holden these two practices are
inextricably linked. Many of our tools lead us down conventional paths towards
predictable outcomes, but Holden arrives at new ideas by designing his own: as
soon as an instrument’s built, though, it’s ready to be taken apart, reassembled
and redeployed, as he continues his search for sonic imperfection. In Holden’s
hands, inanimate tools are reborn as living systems, as the acoustic and the
electronic, the digital and the physical - the man and the machine - are united in
sound.

We visited James Holden in his West London studio to find out more about how
the new record was made.

When did you begin working on the material that would become the new
project?

“The first bits of it came about three or four years ago. I've got this continuous
ongoing project to make a big, ridiculous Max patch for playing live music in.
When it started, I was using Ableton and dozens of Max for Live devices.

“This was when I was doing the Animal Spirits album, and during the first show
we did for that, my Ableton took five minutes to load the set, it was just
ridiculous. I had a high-end laptop at that point, and it was just melting under it.
So I realised I had to change how I was doing it.

“I started building this big Max patch with all my little sequencers, my weird little
synths and stuff. The idea being that you could improvise live with it. I'm up to
version five now, I've been through all these different iterations. The previous
version was what I was using in my collaboration with Waclaw Zimpel - he’s a
Polish clarinet player, electronics kind of guy.

“What I found is that I'll start working

on something - I was making a string  I start designing an instrument
synthesiser kind of thing - and then and then the songs come out
you're testing it and you're playing, by accident as a result
you're tweaking the design of the
software, but it's leading you to ideas,
and then two songs will come out of that. That’s a really long way of saying, as I
fiddled around with my software back then, it was almost like half the ideas for
the album were things that started off as like, ‘I'll just see if the new synth I've
made works properly... oh, it doesn't work at all, great!’ And then that's the idea
for the song.”

So the ideas come out inadvertently while you’re working on the process and
the tools behind them?

“Exactly. I find it quite hard to sit down and say, now I'm going to write a great
album. I find that really daunting. I usually sneak it up on myself, like I start
designing an instrument and then the songs come out by accident as a result. It’s
weird - sometimes I'll go in the studio and something will come out by itself, but
the process and the method of it is really important to me. I have to have some
idea of like… what am I trying to do with the sounds today? That really gets me
over the hump of starting.”

The latest version of James' Max patch (Image credit: James Holden)

When did those ideas begin to take shape?

“It's just evolved gradually. There was a time when I was making music in
Cubase, and trying to do it in the way you imagine people make music in a
sequencer: loading it up, thinking what I want to do, finding the right noise to
start… and I got really bored of making music. There's a little period of my stuff
that I can't really listen to, that I'm not that into.

“It all got a bit stiff, because I was trying to do it in this traditional DAW way. But
the moment I discovered modular and Live and Max, it all just opened up again, I
started really enjoying myself. If you do things the way everyone else does,
you’re gonna get the same results everyone else does. It’s really, really good to
mess with your process.”

Tell us about your studio space?

“The studio’s a half hour walk from my house. We got really lucky, and we
managed to get a little ex-industrial building really cheap. It’s a long story - some
venture capitalists were involved. [laughs] So I've got this little room, and it's
fucking freezing. I can't really use it right now because the electricity I need to
heat it is too expensive. So I've got my computer and my synths set up on the
dining table at the moment.”

You’ve said that your set-up for this album was fairly minimal, just two
synths, the modular and the computer. Could you walk us through that set-
up?

“The big thing I was using the most was the Tor modular that I was using with
Waclaw. There's a lot of plumbing going on to enable the digital control of
everything, but really, it was just a bunch of filters, a few analogue delays, a
resonator, and a few different kinds of saturation. I had it set up with a MIDI
control matrix, so I could patch anything into anything. I was using my Max patch
to drive it all. About 80 percent of what you hear is that, basically.

“Then there are a few other little bits, I've got a Korg Mono/Poly, which is on a
couple of tracks. Then there’s a Prophet-600 in one or two moments, which is
just this magic thing - I turn it on and it's good. It's either ‘that’s amazing!’ or
‘that’s not working’ immediately - it’s such a binary kind of synth. I love it so
much, the tone of the Prophet is really nice. Mine's broken, so one of the voices
is a bit wonky, and it adds a bit of life when you're playing it.

(Image credit: James Holden)

“This room is where I record everything. It's not super big, but it’s got an
interesting shape, and it’s got quite a nice room sound, as I've treated it a bit.
The room is a big part of the record. Luke Abbott recorded his last album here,
Translate, and we evolved this technique of putting every sound in the record
through its own individual speaker, more or less.

“That's the idea - so I'd fill this room with speakers. Behind me, there's a couple I
found behind the bins in the industrial estate. Then I had some nice old Tannoy
monitors, and there’s the monitors that I use up here, a couple of guitar amps, a
bass amp, a rotary speaker… and every sound goes through one of these
speakers in the room, and then right in the middle of the room, there’s a pair of
Coles ribbon mics, a Blumlein stereo pair.

“Basically, you get the sound right in

the room. It really suits me, because  The way I make music is to try
the way I make music is to try and set and set it up as a living system
it up as a living system where where everything's moving by
everything's moving by itself a little bit, itself and interacting with each
and interacting with each other, but I other, but I can steer it
can steer it. So this arpeggio affects
that arpeggio, and they're through
speakers at opposite sides of the room, and you get this real spatial sense of
what's going on. So you kind of mix the record in the room, just by making it
sound exciting. It's so different to mixing on speakers, because by separating the
sounds out, it gives another kind of separation.

Microphones arranged in a Blumlein stereo pair (Image credit: James Holden)

“So we’re just doing it in the room, and doing it with a lot of quick hacks and
hardware, like: that part’s sounding too direct, so I’ll turn the speaker around
and point it the other way. I've got mics out in the foyer as well, to get a longer
reverb on everything.

“That was the secret of the record: I’d do these long live takes with my synth,
mostly with the modular and my computer stuff, playing it all through the room.
Then you've got this stereo mic recording of it, which is full of atmosphere. It's
got the clonks - if I get excited, and I knock something off the table, that's in
there as well. It builds your mix for you.

“What I've been working on the last

few years is a lot of stuff where real  The whole thing has this real
instruments and synths are in the sense of space, a sense that
same thing. So you have to bring the something happened in a
synth into a real space somehow, and room and I recorded it, rather
this is a continuation of that process. than some guy with a mouse
There were less real instruments in
the mix on this record - quite a lot, but
not as many as previously. But the whole thing still has this real sense of space, a
sense that something happened in a room and I recorded it, rather than some
guy with a mouse, which is a different feeling when you listen to it.”

It’s a really cool idea, summing everything together in physical space rather
than in the computer.

“Yeah. You can use the individual channel recordings underneath like you’d use
spot mics, to bring some clarity. It’s such a great way of working, I love it. I told
Waclaw about it, and he went out and bought like a 20 pound digital amp off
eBay and found some cheap speakers in junk shops, then messaged me three
days later saying ‘James, you changed my life!’ [laughs]

“Electronic music exists in this flat, digital, virtual space behind the speakers. It's
not like when you listen to an amazing recording of a jazz band on a great hi-fi,
and you can hear that goes there, the bass is at the back, the drums are over in
that corner… you can hear the room around you. But in electronic music, the
only room you hear in it is very often your own. It's all just pushed to the front of
the speakers. It’s nice to flip that idea around.”

The latest version of James' Max patch (Image credit: James Holden)

Could you talk us through the Max patch you mentioned?

“So the old version was really clunky to use, but the new version looks fucking
cool. There’s these little cubes in space that you wire up and then they represent
either software or hardware modules. The modularity of it is the thing that you
hear the most. Everything can modulate everything, but also I made it so you can
assign parameters as if they're like birds on a spring, flying around the position
of the knob. They flock, and you can have different flocks interacting.

“For example, on the track Trust Your Feet, it's got this thing - there's an LL Cool J
record where he talks about ‘the rhythm is the bass and the bass is the treble’, or
something like that. This track is that kind of idea. There’s a part which is a high
arpeggio, but it's also the bassline and it swings between the two.

“I've got this transposer that works in a scale. But the transposition, if you listen
to it, you can hear that when I turn the knob to swing it down to a low note it
swings past and overshoots, and oscillates around, because it's a modelled
weight-on-a-spring effect happening off my parameter input.”

Kind of like a pendulum?

“Yeah, exactly - you turn the knob and it follows as if it's following it on a spring,
and then it overshoots and goes too far and then springs back and gradually
dampens down. My car’s shock absorbers are fucked, and it's kind of the same
effect.

“Because then you're thinking, I'm going to drop the bass, but you know that it's
not going to respond in this totally predictable way. And then you're responding
to it, and it gives you surprises, which changes the music. That song is different
as a result of having that effect in it, because it led me to play it in a different
way.

“I guess most of the important stuff is my sequencers. I try to program

sequencers that are separate from the scale… so the sequence has a shape and
a rhythm in a scale, and then you manipulate those things separately. So you
can transpose it, but in the scale, or change the shape or add ornaments and
stuff to it.

“Me and Luke talk a lot about different

ways to make arpeggios, and ways to  Luke's got this incredible Max
make the computer understand the patch that understands keys
music it's doing. Ways for the and modes. His Max patch
computer to augment your musical knows more music theory than
abilities. Like I'm a shit pianist, I can't I do
do the arpeggios that I want to do,
ever - that's where it comes from. But
Luke is actually way ahead of me on this now, he's got this incredible Max patch
that understands keys and modes and stuff. His Max patch knows more music
theory than I do.”

An earlier version of James' Max patch (Image credit: James Holden)

Do you two share patches between you?

“A bit, yeah. Leafcutter John, some of the patches he's shown me have really
opened the door on how to do things or approaches or whatever. But also, ideas
go backwards and forwards. Sometimes Luke will suggest something and that
becomes a little plugin that we use between us. Waclaw is really good at
suggesting things - he’s not great at making Max patches, but he's really good at
suggesting things that I can do in 10 minutes, and they're like, fuck - that's such a
good idea.

“He had this idea for a gate that works on pitch. Because he plays a clarinet with
a mic inside, so you get a very clean signal. This gate lets you select the pitch:
you've got loads of Ableton channels with the clarinet going in and then it will
only let through the Cs on that channel, and the Ds on that channel, and so on.
Then he can put them through different effects or different loopers and stuff. He
was like, can you do this? I was like yeah - it’ll take 10 minutes. Then he made an
amazing record with it. It's really satisfying doing that kind of stuff.”

Aside from the software you’ve designed yourself, what other plugins do you
find yourself using most frequently?

“There was a time when I was really into checking out all the plugins and I was
really lusting after all the synths, and I suddenly realised that every time I bought
a plugin I just ruined records with it. It was a really weird psychological mess
going on. So in terms of sound generation or music generation, I don't think I
used anything that wasn't Max or a synth.
“But in terms of mixing, there was one set of plugins that completely changed
my life, mixing this record. I've got my 500 racks, and behind me there's a nice
analogue desk, just to your right is another nice analogue desk, and I’ve got
some really nice preamps here. But I didn't use hardly any of it, because I got
these Airwindows plugins.

“This guy Chris at Airwindows, all his plugins have wack names on the sliders,
they don't have a proper interface, and there's no bullshit to any of it. He's really
into this dogma of not over-processing. If you're doing stuff in digital, you're
losing stuff at every step of the way. He explains the maths on his blog
sometimes, and it's like: oh, I should have realised this 20 years ago! When
you've got 20 plugins on a channel in Ableton, it always sounds like ass. It’s never
good.

A self-built computer 3D-printed by James to run a previous version of his Max patch
(Image credit: James Holden)

“He's got some really nice distortions and tape emulators and stuff like that. But
there's not a picture of a tape machine on it: it just sounds good. Also, these
channel console plugins - you put one on the end of every channel, and then one
where the channels get summed, a different plugin. It does this transform and
inverse transform that means the summing is no longer linear, digital summing.

“I don't know if it was that, or just his

approach of having lots of different  When you've got 20 plugins on
distortions throughout the signal a channel in Ableton, it always
chain, just subtly rounding it off. I sounds like ass. It’s never good
found my mixes came together
quicker. I was much happier. I think
I'm just really happy with the tone of this record. I guess I can't put it all on the
Airwindows plugins, because it was quite a luxury recording process: nice room,
nice mics, nice speakers, nice synths, nice preamps, nice interface. But in the
end it was these basically free, open-source plugins.”

“He’s put his code up as open-source, and I'm starting to learn a bit by picking
through it and understanding how he's done various bits of it. It’s just the way he
presents it. It's like the opposite of… the plugin industry is weird, isn't it? Waves
has this permanent sale on, but then everything sounds the same, it just has a
different interface.”

It’s just the sheer volume of them these days. With that much software
coming out, it’s hard to know what’s good and what isn’t.

“Yeah, and you've got these massive venture capital companies and funds
buying into this space. They're extracting value from a sector but they're not
necessarily adding any. Their interests aren't necessarily the same as our
interests.”

It’s these one-knob plugins you see in YouTube ads which seem to be taking
over - the ones that promise you the cheat code to music production.

“Exactly. You can buy this plugin for 100 bucks, and it's the cheat code to music…
then everyone else has got it, so it's worthless. We're at this weird point. There
was a time 20 years ago, when doing something that sounded like it was made in
a big studio, or doing impressive graphics for your album cover or video or
whatever, that seemed impressive. It looked like you'd spent money, like
someone had put money behind it.

“But we’ve got to the point where

there's so many ways to fake the  Things that look DIY are
appearance of having put money actually cooler, and a human
behind things. I quite like the idea of: touch is nicer to see. It’s all
what if money behind something isn't about the humanity now
a good thing? Things that look DIY are
actually cooler, and a human touch is
nicer to see. Now we've got AIs that can do this kind of shiny bullshit. It just has
zero value. It’s all about the humanity now.”

(Image credit: James Holden)

You’ve said before that you made the shift to Reaper for recording and mixing
a few years ago. What is it about the software you like?

“I did, but I've come back actually. I loved mixing in Reaper, because it was just a
tape machine to me. I didn't really know how to do any quantized editing, and
deliberately didn't teach myself quite a lot of Reaper. I just used it as a mix
console. It saved my ass mixing the Animal Spirits record.

“There was a super interesting thing on Reverb about Talk Talk’s studio methods
a couple of weeks ago, and there's a quote from Mark Hollis where he's saying
there are two things in music: there's the raw, impossible-to-fake, beauty of live
performance, and all that richness. But that can't access the detailed, subtle,
well-judged things that just fall in the right place and the serendipitous
combinations that you get from studio arrangement.

“Reaper is really good for recording -

for me, anyway - and Ableton is really  I realised what I really wanted
good for arranging things. But I found to do was crash live recordings
that I started trying to do mixes in into each other and enjoy the
Reaper for this record, and I realised serendipity of things lining up
what I really wanted to do was crash in a different way
live recordings into each other, and
move my takes around and enjoy the
serendipity of things lining up in a different way. But it was 10 percent slower to
do that in Reaper, so I just went back to Ableton and put it there.

“Ableton is really good for quickly moving shit around and lining it up. I love it for
that. It's alright for mixing in, but you find yourself missing that proper big mixer
view.”

Could you talk us through some of the most prominent effects used on this
album, whether that’s hardware or software?

“It’s a mix. I guess there’s a bit of Valhalla reverb. That's my go-to, if I've not got a
recording of some room reverb, that’s what I’d use. His Room or his Plate plugin.
A few impulse response reverbs, a couple of my own impulse recordings and a
couple of downloaded ones.

“I still use this old SIR2 convolution plugin, because to me it sounds better than
all the fancy new ones. I don't know what else… mostly it’s my own delays. I built
a really nice delay in Max with a really nice kind of chorus-y modulation to it -
that's most of the delay you hear on the record.”

The press release says that you were effectively sampling yourself for this
project. Is that a process you’re drawn to, recording loose jams and ideas and
then piecing them together later on?

“In the past I would generate huge long takes and then get overwhelmed trying
to pull them apart. But I think a little bit of collaborating with people is that I've
learned to get to what I want a little bit quicker. I’ll fuck around for a while first,
and then I'll press record.

“I've got the judgement of when's the

best time to press record a bit better  If I play drums or piano, it's
now. It's the tiniest skill, but it makes always got to be a rescue job.
such a big difference. Because if But that makes it quite fun -
you're overwhelmed by three hours of some of my accidents are the
takes you might miss the really good best bits of drumming on the
bit that you did. Because I'm not that record
good at instruments - I'm just a bit
clumsy - if I play drums or piano, it's
always got to be a rescue job. But that makes it quite fun, because you find
something serendipitous, like… you didn't mean to play that note, but it was
good, wasn't it? Some of my accidents are the best bits of drumming on the
record.”

(Image credit: James Holden)

The press release mentions that you played piano and violin for the first time
on this record. What do you think was stopping you from doing this earlier?

“You’ll probably have to ask my therapist. [laughs] My dad taught himself piano
and he taught me piano, and then I learned violin at school. There was a bit of
pressure from my family, like - you should learn proper music. So I didn't fully
value it. I stuck with the violin because I was a good boy, really. I wasn't super
enjoying it as a child.

“It was only afterwards that I

discovered Tony Conrad or John Cale  I had this residual feeling of
or Jean-Luc Ponty, the cool violin discomfort with the idea of
players. It took me 10 years to find playing it. Then I realised that
some cool violinists after I'd stopped actually, I'm a different person
playing violin, but even then, I had this now
residual feeling of discomfort and
embarrassment with the idea of
playing it. Then I realised that actually, I'm a different person now, and I can pick
it up and really enjoy it. It’s funny - you change as you get older, I guess.”

You told us in 2018 that for the Animal Spirits record, you had a ‘dogma
manifesto’ of rules that you later ended up breaking. Did you take a similar
approach with this record?

“No, I didn't. It was hard having rules. I only broke them a little tiny bit - two or
three edits. But as a consequence of the rules, I spent all of my budget for that
record on getting everyone in the studio for a week and a half. I couldn't afford
to do it again, but at the end of that week and a half, most of it was great, but
there were a couple of songs where I didn't play as well as I could have.

“There was nothing I could do about it, I was stuck with it. That was a really
horrible feeling. In the end, I made sense of it, but it was really difficult. So this
time around I didn't make a rod for my own back in the same way.”

I guess working with computers, it’s easy to get used to the idea that anything
can be edited.

“That's another benefit of the Airwindows plugins. Because I'm using them
instead of putting everything through a desk, and it means I can just load stuff
up and not have to spend 20 minutes trying to line the faders up to where they
were before.

“When I’m composing, the modular is great, because it takes away that recall, so
it makes you commit to a take because you don’t think you can come back and
recapture the vibe tomorrow. But in
terms of mixing, I don't think I've ever  I don't think I've ever got a mix
got a mix right in a day, ever, so a right in a day, ever, so a
console is actually quite annoying to console is actually quite
me for that reason… [laughs]” annoying to me for that
reason…
Could you tell us about some of the
field recordings you incorporated
into this record?

“We just went on some adventures with one of my friends, this guy who records
as Hidden Rung. We went wandering around with him. They have sound mirrors
on the coast, near Kent and Dover. These big domes that were for listening for
aeroplanes, concentrating sound before they had any electronics to do it. We did
some hollering in front of them, but it was really windy so that didn't work out.
But then we just found a nice beach, and he put the recorder down and it
seemed really serendipitous - the kids, the beach, the aeroplane.

“There’s another one where me and Gemma just got drunk and went for a walk
in the village my parents live in, down by the canal, recording owls and stuff like
that. There’s an owl, a sheep, and a train going past. The one with the train going
past, again, it was a technical experiment - I put this Doepfer phaser in my rack, I
was just seeing if I could get something good out of it and did this little live jam.

“Then I dropped the recording of that live take into Reaper where this field
recording was, and there's a bit where I'd killed the synth with the filter and then
brought it back in half a bar. And in that gap, by coincidence, there's a train
sounding the horn, and then the music starts again. Okay, so Jesus says I've got
to leave it like that… [laughs]”

(Image credit: James Holden)

The album is described as a ‘continuous sound collage’ and it feels more like
one coherent journey, as opposed to a collection of discrete elements. What
is it you’re drawn to about that structure?

“I don’t know what it is. I've always liked that, that magic radio kind of feeling. I
grew up when you could find weird radio stations - that was the most exciting
music I could hear for a little while in my youth, because I didn't have access to
much else. A lot of the records that were a really big influence on me growing
up, and also those that I was thinking about for this record, were Future Sound
of London, The KLF, and stuff like Negativland as well.

“I really enjoy that as a way of

listening. People say albums are dead.  The only way I can really
You need a reason - if it's just 10 songs conceive of putting an album
on Spotify, I don't know if it necessarily out is if it's like a whole thing -
needs to be an album. But if you make a world, an idea, a concept, a
it a trip, then you've tied it all together, story. It’s quite important
and no fucking corporation can pull it
into little bits and atomize it. The only
way I can really conceive of putting an album out is if it's like a whole thing - a
world, an idea, a concept, a story. It’s quite important.”

It sounds like you were reaching quite far back in terms of your musical
influences this time around, back to the teenage years almost?

“It was a little bit. I'm not really sure why - it wasn't a super conscious decision. In
terms of what I've been listening to, it's not like my listening tastes suddenly
changed or I went back to digging through old records or anything. I guess
lockdown did remind me of what it was like being a teenager: just waiting and
waiting for something to happen.

“That put me back in the same kind of headspace and made me think about that.
What I'd be getting out to, or what I wanted to do when I got out. Raves, and that
ravey end of things, at a certain moment, when we were locked up and
miserable, did seem like the ultimate dream: getting out into a sweaty, loud
environment again.

“I learned to make music and made my first records on this thing called Jeskola
Buzz, and my Max patch began to get to the point where it started to remind me
of the feeling of using that. It leads you towards that kind of music slightly, as it’s
a tracker interface. In a way, I went away from that stuff because of the way life
took me.

“When I started, I didn't really know

about DJ scenes. There can be quite a  Some DJs I've met, they
conservative set of values and culture imagine that the whole crowd
around them. I found it quite a difficult is full of the worst, dumbest,
culture shock, putting records out and most basic bitches possible,
then meeting people who were and then they play for that!
evaluating them in a context that I Why?! Is that the job you
didn't understand or agree with. And wanted?
then being a DJ, and getting that very
direct feedback off the crowd
continuously every weekend. It really colours how you think about music: what
you dare to do, what you want to do, or whatever.

“Coming out of that, doing the collaborations and the Animal Spirits record, it
meant that I was disconnected enough from that world. It was almost like I got
back to that teenage headspace. I know a few DJs that I really like - we saw
Oceanic a little while ago and it was fucking amazing - so I'm still connected, but
I'm not so in deep that what people might sneer at, or think is cool, really
registers with me. I'm not letting that in, I'm not having it. That's put me back to
this naive state of: I'll just do what makes me feel excited and see if it resonates.
It seems like it's working actually, so I'm quite relieved… [laughs]”

That subconscious assumption of how something might be received can really

fuck with your creativity.
“Yeah, definitely. You can hear how conservative records are when they're aimed
at a club dance floor. I was talking with Tom Ravenscroft about DJing, and I was
saying that I like to imagine that there’s someone just like me in the crowd.

“Some DJs I've met, they imagine the opposite - they imagine that the whole
crowd is full of the worst, dumbest, most basic bitches possible, and then they
play for that! Like, why?! Is that the job you wanted? It just boils it down to the
lowest common denominator of nothing. An AI can do that, so we don't need to
do that anymore.

“It’s part of my journey as a human that when I started, what other people
thought really affected me. It still does, but now I see that it's really important to
put a boundary up. There are plenty of people who think just like me, and it's
really nice to think I'm just making music for those people, because I can really
connect with them. They'll get it.”

(Image credit: James Holden)

Listening through your previous albums, to me they sound more minimal

than the new record, which feels much busier sonically. Has that been a
conscious transition?

“That's funny, because in a way, this one is still quite simple. I'm putting together
the live set now and some of the tracks don't have very many channels in. I
guess how I wanted to develop was to learn to make my arrangements more
interesting.

“As someone whose brain is wired a certain way - I'm waiting for a diagnosis
from the NHS, but we'll see - I have difficulty concentrating most of the time, but
then when I get in a flow, in a trance, it can go for 12 hours, and I'm on the verge
of wetting myself or passing out from hunger.

“For me, it pushes my buttons so much to just play four chords on the piano for
an hour, or just sit and listen to a drone for a while. The Inheritors, I was super
happy with, but there was maybe a slight one-dimensionality to each track,
because I was so happy to just exist in this one place that I didn't even consider
that it could have a left turn or that it could go off in a different direction. That
was the conscious part of this record.

“I'll never be able to do a bridge or a

middle eight or a chorus in a song, I  I'll never be able to do a bridge
just can't. That transition breaks the or a middle eight or a chorus in
trance flow, and it just kills it for me. a song, I just can't. That
When I was in high school music class, transition breaks the trance
we had to write a piece. Me and my flow, and it just kills it
mate had a Casio keyboard, and me
and my mate had written this thing
that had a verse and a chorus. And I was playing the verse, and I realised I don't
know how to get to the chorus… like, it just doesn't make sense! We were just
playing the verse for like 10 minutes and the music teacher was like, you’ve got
to stop now. [laughs]”

Could you tell us more about the photographs that inspired this record?

“There’s a photographer called John Stezaker. Looking at his pictures and talking
about that stuff with Luke and Gemma was my way of working out how to make
something that’s minimal but has a change of direction or intersection or
juxtaposition in it. He does these pictures where there’s like an artist’s stock
photo with a cliff face just cut across it, or something. The two make these quite
magical coincidences. They’re completely different things crashing into each
other, but they expose the other thing.

James Holden's analogue desk and Prophet-600 (Image credit: James Holden)

“The first single off the record [Contains Multitudes] is definitely the best
example of that. It was this Orbital-y, psy, kind of banger, the first half of the
track. I was just like listening to it as a loop and playing it on the modular and
thinking, this doesn't have a beginning or middle or an end yet. But I could hear
this kind of Latin piano jazz, something in the mould of Pharaoh Sanders’ version
of Olé. I've got a £20 pound Casio keyboard and just picked it up and came up
with the second half of the piece on that on the first go. Then luckily for
everyone I re-recorded it on a proper piano.”

To my ears, this album feels more positive and optimistic in tone than some
of your others. Is there any truth to that observation?

“Yeah, 100 percent. It was a bit deliberate. Everything was shit, the whole world
was shit. I thought if I'm gonna put records out, and enjoy the privilege of putting
records out, then I want them to be something that brings some joy to everyone.
What's the most giving and positive thing I can possibly do with it?
“The Inheritors was a reaction against
the world I was in. It was a bit of an  Everyone was doing very clean,
aggressive act in its own silly little way. minimal, tidy stuff, and I was
Everyone was doing very clean, just distorting everything
minimal, tidy stuff, and I was just through tubes and putting it
distorting everything through tubes out of time on purpose
and putting it out of time on purpose.
But I didn't feel the need this time. I'm
not fighting anyone now, I'm quite content. You have to be brave, somehow, to
be open and naive and positive. It feels more exposing in a way, putting
something like this out. If everyone had hated it, I would have been really upset
this time around. [laughs]”

I suppose people often respond to vulnerability in music.

“Yeah. When you listen to music, and you get something deep out of it, what is
happening there? What is it? I’ve thought quite a lot about that. When you're
writing songs, you project things that are going on in your psyche onto the song.
It's not necessarily universal, what everyone will get out of it. But it's surprising
how much of it does resonate. It's a funny kind of process. There’s something on
the Animal Spirits that I couldn't play the demo of without crying. But then by the
time I'd finished it, it kind of leaves me emotionless. It’s kinda weird.”

(Image credit: James Holden)

There’s a real looseness to the timing in your music. I know you released the
Humanizer M4L plugin a few years ago. Could you talk us through how you
approach timing more generally?

“When I discovered the research by this guy Holger Hennig, who had done these
studies about how human timing worked, it made me think about the way we
approach recording. What he proved is that when people play together, there's a
two-way feedback process in the rhythm.

“You can't fake that - if one person does it, and the other person does it
afterwards, you've only got a one-way feedback process. That’s what led me to
the dogma of the Animal Spirits, this idea that everything has to be recorded
together. Because it's not just the timing where the feedback is interesting, it's
the way people interact musically.

“It completely changed my approach

to everything. It's still in there -  It's impossible for me to do a
sometimes I catch myself thinking, if straight clock. Every part is a
you do it like that, it won’t be two- separate player who drifts
directional enough. I'm less dogmatic relative to the other one
about it now. My Humanizer patch
works, but you can waste a lot of time
trying to make it work perfectly, or do everything by the book. So now in my Max
patch, I have a version of that humanization running on everything. It's
impossible for me to do a straight clock. Every part is a separate player who
drifts relative to the other one.

“That fed into the idea of things being like flocks that could influence each other.
This whole thing opened up a lot of my approach at the moment to things that
resonated or reminded me of humanizing. It's interesting, the people who
discovered it patented it, and they've licensed it to a software company now. So I
can’t update the Max for Live patch, but they're gonna let me leave it up as is. It's
a shame, but it'll be nice if they can make it into a package that's usable for more
people with a less technical background. That could be really cool.”

You spoke in a recent interview about AI in music, and you mentioned you
were concerned about where the recent developments could lead. Could you
elaborate on that?

“In this country, Luddite is a bad word, isn't it? I read the Wikipedia article about
them, and realised that it's one of these things where history is written by the
winners. The Luddites weren't anti-technology. They just wanted technology not
to take away their good job and replace it with a shit job that was dangerous and
hard work and didn't provide any pay or give them any control over their
conditions. But the way this country is run, they were beaten down by the army,
because this country is run for capital.

“Broadly, AI is the same thing happening. You or I can’t make an AI, you need a
fucking billion dollars to train them. Then when you’ve spent a billion dollars on
training the stupid thing your shareholders want a return. It's just terrifying to
me.

The latest version of James' Max patch (Image credit: James Holden)

“Technology generally hands power to the people who can afford it and takes
power away from another group. We have a shit government, America has a shit
government, and we've already seen it happen. That's the thing with Spotify.
What happened was big money found a way to short-circuit the whole music
industry and reduce the price of music to nearly nothing. The major labels are
fine, because they own a share of Spotify. The money people, the shareholders,
are all okay. But we've seen our entire ecosystem get fucked totally.
“When I started there was this broad
middle of musicians, people who  The money people, the
weren't super famous - they could go shareholders, are all okay. But
out in central London, no one would we've seen our entire
recognise them - but they were paying ecosystem get fucked totally
their mortgage and they were living a
decent life. But that middle has shrunk
by 90 percent, 95 percent. It’s shit. What have we gained out of that? All we've
gained is Daniel Ek having a lot of money. I don't know what the answer is. But
just being rude to people who like AI is definitely not the answer.”

It’s frustrating, because as troubling as the technology’s implications are, the

creative possibilities are equally fascinating.

“I've seen some AI stuff which has been really interesting for music. There’s a
Max device called nn~, which Luke was playing with. He was feeding in his drum
machine and it was encoding it and then using the 1960s music dataset to spit it
back out, but it was spitting out jazz drums that were playing his rhythm. I
thought fucking hell, that's amazing. This style transfer stuff, you could play that,
that could be an instrument, you could do a performance. The rules of music
would apply.

“A lot of this other stuff, where you

type a prompt in: I want a deep house  It's funny that I try to build
track with a soulful vocal. There's no little living systems and sets of
way for that to be a musical rules and make autonomous
experience. I've seen some other cybernetic music, but I fucking
things where the AI can let you pull hate AI
the bass out of this track and the
snares out of this track. To me, that
doesn't look like music-making any more, it looks like scrapbooking. It looks like
making a Pinterest. It's a different activity - it doesn't have that real-time, I'm
doing a thing, I'm learning how to adjust what I do to get to a better result, kind
of thing.

“You can't be a musician playing a black box. You can't do any kind of art playing
a black box. The black box is just doing its thing. It's funny that I try to build little
living systems and sets of rules and make autonomous cybernetic music, but I
fucking hate AI - even though it's kind of trying to do the same thing - because
it’s this inscrutable black box. If I wanted an inscrutable, impossible black box, I
know some really great musicians that have really difficult personalities, and I
could just have them round instead… [laughs]”

James Holden’s Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities is

out now on Border Community.

Matt Mullen
Tech Editor

I'm the Tech Editor for MusicRadar, working across everything from artist
interviews to product news to tech tutorials. I love electronic music and I'm
endlessly fascinated by the tools we use to make it. When I'm not behind my
laptop keyboard, you'll find me behind a MIDI keyboard, carefully crafting
the beginnings of another project that I'll ultimately abandon to the creative
graveyard that is my overstuffed hard drive.

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