- It's been 15 years since James Holden first appeared as a teenage trance hero, but a large portion of his fame still rests on his reputation as a progressive house DJ and producer, something his music has recently moved away from. His 2013 album, The Inheritors, was the strongest signal yet, an effort that contained almost no DJ-friendly material and occupied a strange middle ground between psychedelic, ambient, free improvisation and moody synthesizer music. It presumably left many fans of his more dance floor-leaning past baffled.
Given this new direction, a Thursday night gig with a live drummer at (Le) Poisson Rouge, formerly New York's Village Gate jazz club, was a tantalizing prospect. The long stage, low ceilings and all-black ambience of the basement space provide a suitably stark backdrop for its mostly avant-garde bookings. When I arrived, FIXED resident JDH was playing ambient to a near-empty floor, while onstage Forma were putting the finishing touches to their massive live set-up. It was refreshing to see the space slowly fill up as the Brooklyn trio worked their way through 40 minutes of techno-influenced cosmic synth jams, the growing crowd slowly warming to their sound. When they finished, JDH resumed position, this time playing with more rhythmic intensity.
Nothing could have prepared those in attendance for Holden’s set, though. Early on, fans shouted out the names of their favourite tracks. Holden smiled back, and then went about his plans unperturbed, unleashing just over an hour of psychedelic music. Even though I was expecting something a little more outré, I still found the set perplexing. Some of the more psych-leaning moments of The Inheritors popped up in heavily altered form, and the overall feeling of the music felt much closer to '70s acid rock than most of that album. (Holden spent much of the set headbanging along to the drummer's rock rhythms). Even his modular synth-centered performance seemed to mimic the arcs of guitars at times.
Labels like Spectrum Spools have covered this ground quite well since 2009, so it’s not exactly unknown territory, but it still represents an appreciably risky position for a major artist formerly known for big room anthems. If The Inheritors showed Holden beating a path very far from what he had previously been known for, this performance confirmed that there was definitely no desire to look back.