James Holden, Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of all Possibilities review — utopian electronic music

Live music and recorded music have branched apart since the 1950s. Before then, recordings were documents of live performances, the captured sound of musicians and vocalists bashing out songs together in the studio. But technology transformed the practice of making a record. From the middle of that decade, multitrack recorders allowed instrumental and vocal parts to be taped separately. Creating a song became a matter of assembling different components, like editing a film. Or, less exaltedly, manufacturing a car.

Discontent about this divergence lies at the heart of James Holden’s work. He’s a British electronic music producer whose fascinating albums dramatise a kind of identity crisis about what it means to produce electronic music. Released in 2013, The Inheritors was named after a William Golding novel about the extinction of the last Neanderthal tribe by Homo sapiens. Created with a mix of antique synthesisers and modern software, the album restaged the confrontation as a clash between analogue and digital eras. Following in 2017, The Animal Spirits was made without overdubs with a live band. Inspired by trance, both of the dance music and devotional variety, it made a conscious effort to avoid the artifice of studio recording.

Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of all Possibilities is his psychedelically named new album. Like its predecessors, the tracks are instrumentals. The range of acoustic material incorporates AI software, modular synths, sequencers, drum kits, piano and a violin (which Holden reluctantly learnt to play as a child in Leicestershire). There are field recordings of children on a beach and people walking. For the final mix, the music was played through a circular set of speakers and re-recorded, muddling the distinction between live and pre-taped.

“You Are in a Clearing” places the listener in a pastoral setting where pounding drums and starbursts of illumination suggest the beginning of an outdoor rave. A chiming Orbital-like melody in “Trust Your Feet” and the vintage breakbeats of “Contains Multitudes” place the action in the pre-corporatised electronic music scene of 30 years ago. But other inspirations make themselves heard too, from krautrock’s cosmic music to an idiosyncratic meeting between folk and funk on “Worlds Collide Mountains Form”. 

All these musical traditions merge together like the overlapping sounds in the mix. There’s no tidy splitting of instrumental parts here. Instead, distortion and drones cause the different musical elements to bleed together. The underlying impulse is utopian, not to split the audio world into individual strands but rather create the impression of togetherness, a shared moment in time.

★★★★☆

‘Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of all Possibilities’ is released by Border Community