Like most electronic producers, James Holden is a man of few press shots. But the photograph that accompanies the English musician’s radically different new album—a moonlit trance bacchanal recorded live with an ensemble of improvisers dubbed the Animal Spirits—gives us a strong hint of his strange new direction. Dressed in the drab grey overalls of an industrial technician, Holden seems to have wandered out from the concrete towers behind him, lured towards us by strange forces lurking in the long grass. With clouds brooding above and a crackle of electricity in the air, there’s a sense that something revelatory is happening, a machine-builder heading into the unknown.
Holden’s lengthy career in electronic music, which began in 2000 with a progressive dance hit that hailed him as a teenage wunderkind, has been a constant battle against dancefloor conservatism. It’s taken a long time for him to shake off his reputation as a master of melodic euphoria, as perfected on his tear-jerking 2004 remix of Nathan Fake’s “The Sky Was Pink.” And since 2006, he’s been leading his own self-described “rebellion against dance music,” armed with wonky mixes, loose timing, and chaotic systems. But seen from the perspective of The Animal Spirits, Holden’s back catalog also reveals itself to be a determined, nearly two-decade-long exploration of every possible facet of “trance”—first as a genre, then as a state of mind.
With 2013’s The Inheritors, his long-in-the-making second album, Holden brought his modular synthesizer to life through computer systems that could mimic the subtly shifting rhythms of a human player. In the last few years, Holden has only released collaborations: three swirling folk dances with Moroccan Gnawa musician Maalem Mahmoud Guinia, and a 47-minute tribute to minimalist shaman Terry Riley with tabla player Camilo Tirado.
The Animal Spirits is an album-length amalgamation of all of these collaborative projects, expanding his live setup with Tom Page to include saxophonist Etienne Jaumet (who previously lent his freeform skronk to The Inheritors), cornetist Marcus Hamblett, multi-instrumentalist Liza Bec on recorders and North African ghaïta, and Lascelle Gordon of free jazz group Woven Entity. It’s also his most dramatic rejection yet of anything resembling “dance music” in the functional, DJ-led sense. The album was recorded live in one room at Holden’s Sacred Walls studio in London: single takes, no overdubs, no edits. While his modular synth still guides much of the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material, Holden occupies the role of bandleader rather than frontman, simply laying the stage for his collaborators’ off-the-cuff creativity; he specifically names Don Cherry and Pharoah Sanders as inspirations, drawing a link between the universal preoccupations of their spiritual jazz albums and the sense of ritual abandon at the heart of what Holden calls “folk-trance.”
In tribute to the Eastern influences of Cherry and Sanders, the album opens with a loose incantation by a feral-sounding choir; you can picture them shaking out their limbs and stretching their tongues as they “om” and “ah” over shakers and bells, which bleed into the second track, “Spinning Dance.” Here, the pagan barn-dance really gets going—clapping hands and drum rolls lay an unstable foundation, as Bec’s treble recorder trills its way through the gaps, drunk on moonshine and tripping over hay bales. “Pass Through the Fire” is a ritual performance, drums landing like a dozen pairs of feet shimmying round the burning pyre, while Holden layers his noisy synths against the chunky blast of Jaumet’s saxophone. It’s absolutely silly, but also incredibly loud, and the sheer volume is enough to carry us into their bacchanal.
Holden’s North African inspirations are audible on the outrageously titled “Thunder Moon Gathering,” where organs and brass coalesce into a snaking, freeform melody, and the closing track, “Go Gladly Into the Earth,” which riffs on the topsy-turvy organ playing of Ethiopia’s Hailu Mergia. Occasionally, however, the ensemble travels on straighter tracks. The cycling arpeggios of “Each Moment Like the First” call back to the krautrock influence running through The Inheritors, though Page’s live drums add a layer of unnecessary fuss. On that track, there’s a sense that playing loose doesn’t always come easily; halfway through, a handful of noisy synths interrupt the groove for no particular reason, a blurted improvisation that feels too self-aware.
Mostly, however, the clumsiness and chaos feels built-in. The foundational edict of Holden’s “folk-trance” mission—that repetition brings about an altered state of mind—remains true no matter how loose the rhythm, how un-griddable the swing. The leap Holden has made from The Inheritors is colossal—now a bandleader of a live ensemble rather than a solitary synth programmer, he has opened the door to an entirely different sort of career for himself, one where concerns for the dancefloor shrink away to nothing, and the possibilities of repetition are infinite.
