Around the release of his 2006 debut LP, The Idiots Are Winning, UK producer James Holden was asked by production magazine Future Music to list his top 10 pieces of gear. He's a space cadet in the interview, turning idly in a messy room. By my count he names eight items, three of which are stuffed animals, with a fourth being a shelf of children's action figures overlooking his computer. It's a performance by an artist who at the time was still trying to shake his reputation as a barely legal trance wunderkind/Britney Spears remixer: Holden had burst onto the scene in the late 90s with the kind of progressive tracks that fans still upload to YouTube accompanied by pictures of beaches and sunsets.
He probably wouldn't admit it, but Holden learned something from those early trance hits: go big or go home. It's an impulse he's honed even as he's backpedaled from his early recordings: see his skyscraping remix of Nathan Fake's "The Sky Was Pink". Holden's second album, The Inheritors, is a raging bonfire of electro-acoustic composition. His kindling is the open-field psychedelia of groups like Cluster and Popol Vuh, with a healthy amount of Boards of Canada's dusty gaze. Broken into 15 tracks but playing like a long, evolving piece, The Inheritors oscillates between buzzy pastoral beauty and harsh rhythmic duress. It's the sound of an artist uniquely in tune with his instrument, as Holden coaxes all manner of beastly noise out of his mighty modular synthesizer, trying to keep that sound organized and only sometimes succeeding.
Holden takes advantage of that instrument-- essentially a bespoke synthesis engine adapted for each track, aided by software Holden writes himself-- by embracing its imprecision. He recorded his curdling circuitry live, capturing plenty of pots and divots in the process, which gives The Inheritors a savage and craggy feel. If Boards of Canada evoke the beauty and majesty of the rolling countryside, Holden is puts you in direct contact with it, forcing you to engage its uneven terrain and irregular placements. This comes through on tracks like "The Illuminations", on which pretty, circular patterns are interrupted by haphazard distortion and chords are held to the speaker's breaking point.
In most electronic music, the core elements-- drums, bassline, lead-- play well-defined roles and inhabit familiar sonic spaces. The Inheritors doesn't work like that. The rhythms and melodies come from odd places, sometimes switching roles during the course of a song. The title track, for example, is a hurricane of sound, sharp percussive hits fighting back a massive, distorted midrange assault. When Holden does break out traditional drum sounds-- during the climax of lead single "Renata" or "Delabole", for example-- they amplify the intensity, offering the gargled synth patterns something to spring from. The Inheritors comes to a head with "Gone Feral" and the title track, a sequence during which Holden unleashes his circuity and records the carnage. The hissing, buckling oscillations during this stretch wipe clean the careful pacing of tracks like "Inter-City 125" and "Rannoch Dawn". When he dials it down afterwards he has a sense of humor about it: "Some Respite".
It's difficult to describe the sound of The Inheritors without coming off like an analog apologist. But turn a track like "Blackpool Late Eightes"-- the penultimate and longest track, which acts as something of a victory lap-- up on a good system and you can feel its humming warmth, the air it browbeats around the room. You can imagine a shamanic Holden working amidst his machines, alternately reigning them in and provoking them. After dozens of listens, The Inheritors still feels like it could fall off the rails at any moment, that its wires could trip and the whole album devolve into a mess of feedback that will have you racing to unplug your speakers. Holden's ability to wrangle a complex synthesizer isn't unique; his ability to make that skill seem utterly necessary, is.
