James Holden – Contains Multitudes
James Holden’s hair is so much longer now. In a recent press shot accompanying the announcement of Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities, his first album in five years, it frames his face in wisps and lustrous swoops. It’s almost mystical, hood-like and… shamanic. It’s a sign of Holden’s new direction, an introspective turn that sees him exploring the expanse of his electronic psychedelia by way of his dreams and imagination. For Holden, it’s about making the fantastical tangible. “I used to balance my clock radio on a wardrobe to catch the faint pirate FM signals from the nearest city, dreaming of what raves would be like when I could finally escape and become a New Age traveller,” he says of his latest work, which he calls “uncynical, naive, unguarded, the record teenage me wanted to make.”
Pre-order Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities here
Contains Multitudes makes perfect sense as the first single taken from this upcoming project. The track is an immersive ten minute opus, composed of a sea of synthesisers against a slowly dissolving lo-fi new jack swing beat. Sometimes, the synths collide like atoms. Sometimes, they swirl together with ease, like the strands of Holden’s hair. About midway through, the beat decays to nothingness, in its place a rollicking tabla that adds a transcendental edge to Holden’s trippy synth improvisations. From the ether, a piano concerto, the distant clang of brass cymbals and drums. It’s like being pulled through the very vortex of Holden’s mind and coming out through his third eye, a boundless flow of sound, colours, and texture that feels, well, multitudinous.
Listen to Contains Multitudes below.
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