Crack

At 30, James Holden has already had a long and distinguished career. With only one full length album released so far, he has garnished the kind of broad critical acclaim that has seen him remix everyone from Madonna to Depeche Mode. Though Holden studied Maths at Oxford University, it was the success of his first 12", Horizons, released in 1999 that secured him a future in dance music.

Holden's Border Community record label has existed at the centre of his activity ever since, the imprint he co-runs with his girlfriend, having cultivated the releases of Nathan Fake amongst others. One of the leading talents of UK electronica, he has long been eager - with both records and club nights under the Border Community banner - to smash the commonly held belief that dance music is "this closed thing that's really off putting for people who aren’t subscribed to it.”

Holden’s comments make him sound like something of a renegade, but it is this forthright and honest attitude that has earned him respect at home and abroad. It was shortly after his late evening set on the main stage at 2008’s Glade Festival that I first met him. Having just stepped off the stage after drawing one of the biggest crowds of the weekend, he stressed the inspiration with which Border Community runs. “When we started [Border Community], we hated the music scene, so it was really easy to fight against it. Then for a while we had it easy and then all this stuff that was like a bad copy of what we did five years ago is everywhere, and it really makes you hate that sound, so we're looking for something new.”

When reminded of that meeting, James laughs and reflects on the unequalled hedonistic nature of Glade, and the sad news of its cancellation this year. “I stayed the whole weekend last time. It was such a lovely festival. It’s gutting that it’s been cancelled - I really hope they don’t give up.”

Glade festival’s struggle to satisfy the many regulations requests from the local authorities was compounded by its move to a new venue last year, Matterley Bowl, in an effort to ease the bureaucracy. More than a few were dissatisfied by the new venue - though this year the local authorities were even harder on the festival, the main factor for its cancellation. James is hopeful: “I sort of hope they go back to the original location. They seem like nice people - the people that run it - it's obvious from the event that there's something nice about them. They’re not just capitalists. So I really hope they carry on.”

His set that day typified his DJ style, incorporating a sampler and CDJs and touching on many variations of electronica whilst focusing on none, ranging from “dark electro” to Aphex Twin and back to those soaring almost trance like numbers he always throws into his sets. He dismissed my description of it as techno in any form, saying: “I feel quite happy at the moment because I'm just playing what I want - because there's no good techno to play.”

Holden has instead crafted a canonical categorisation all of his own, something evident in the recent DJ Kicks compilation which sees him follow in the footsteps of Carl Craig, Booka Shade, and Four Tet - the latter being a close friend of Holden's.

"Everything he does is my favourite," he says of the artist who for a year was a resident at the Border Community club nights in London, and whose latest release - There is Love In You, showed a renewed emphasis for the house and techno template he only hinted at with previous EP Ringer. The sound of Kieran Hebden, AKA Four Tet, has progressed from the folk-tainted electronics of his early releases, (typified by the broad output of the record label Domino, whose roster also includes Caribou and Animal Collective) to the glitchy, cut-up house of his latest work, which has been tellingly remixed by a swathe of in-fashion dance producers such as Floating Points and Joy Orbison. "It's quite rewarding to see the influence of his club adventures on his last album,” James says.

It is inevitable that Four Tet’s output would have been influenced by his residency at Corsica Studios, as well as a string of DJ sets at Plastic People, another venerable London club. Yet the adventures of the Border Community club night are not ones most commonly associated with the London club scene, Andrew Hung of Bristol noise duo Fuck Buttons also recently graced the decks there. James is enthused by this variation: "Andrew’s a really good DJ actually. It's why I'm so excited about music at the moment, because we keep discovering people who come from a different direction, but they see the world in a similar way to us. I really like this music for dancing, but it's not the dance music scene or traditional dance music. People like him and Kieran are really instrumental in making that into a scene on its own."

The Border Community nights have always tried to approach the club experience from a different angle. This was true when they were hosted at seminal London club - The End, before it closed its doors, the night having since moved to its new home at Corsica Studios. James seems pleased with the move, agreeing that the sound system there is one of the best in the capital. “We loved it. You could never replace The End, it’s lost, and it’s sad, there isn’t a big club in London that had the feeling that The End had. But Corsica is a different thing - it’s not too big so that makes it a lot easier to have a good sound system.”

Holden frequently bills live bands during the opening hours of the club night, testing people’s expectations and maintaining a vision of dance music alternative to the norm. “We had Rocketnumbernine play recently - from Kieran’s label - a jazz trained drummer and his brother playing analogue synths. It was quite chaotic to have that at the start of the night, but the sound was so incredible, it was such a powerful, raw, animal experience to hear it live.”

Caribou is another electronic artist who Holden has hosted at his night, and whose song Lemon Yogurt appears on the DJ Kicks track list. James reveals that he has just finished a remix of Bowls, a track from the Canadian's most recent LP Swim, the album being a sign that the two share a common belief that music can be danceable whilst not niche. "I love him, I've always been a fan of his stuff. It's really important what he's trying to say with his album. It's the place it occupies. It's dance music but it's nothing like dance music. I love that."

Talk of the Caribou remix spurs James on to describe his own struggle with dance music's penchant for the recycling of sounds, scenes, and production techniques. "I've been learning a lot, these past few years. I'm always trying to move on. You can see my progression from the Mercury Rev remix, which was nice but flawed, the Radiohead one works, Mogwai was a step closer to being right, and now the Caribou one is like...I think I've hit it, and I'm quite excited for my own music now."

Holden's tour schedule has been relentless and without pause, the DJ already having left his Norfolk base to tour the world several times over. Only at the end of his current touring itinerary will he find the space and time necessary to allow him to work on his own music. James explains: "Being a DJ really cuts a hole in your ability to write music. It's really hard to get anything done before you have to go away, and you lose the whole feeling you had in the studio. I'm looking forward to the end of the tour when I'll get some time to concentrate on playing with synthesizers.”

It's certain that any future release will build on the psychedelic, morphing sound of his debut album The Idiots Are Winning, whilst rejecting any of the current trends or respective movements. Holden's music, both his own and his remix work, retains an unknown and ethereal quality which means he exists outside of the immediate hype of the dance music landscape in Britain. The artwork alone for the Border Community releases hints at surrealism, isolation, and a hazardous experimental edge, as if his Norfolk origins allow him to look upon London’s scene rather than actively partake in it. Europe’s wider network of superstar techno DJs, the ones playing showcases at Apple stores, are clearly not to James’ tastes. "Other people made me hate dance music somehow, I really had to find a way of making dance music so that the sound or the content didn't annoy me."

As he talks about one of Four Tet's recent sets at Corsica Studios, you can tell Holden is one of few successful DJs who still have a genuine urge to do something original and distinct - his perspective being one that astutely remains on the dance floor, as the listener, with the value of dancing as an experience being most important. "There was a moment really late in the night when you're sort of lost in the club, and he [Four Tet] played a couple of African high life records and I'd never danced to that kind of thing before. But I completely knew how to dance to it and knew I wanted to. There's something common about dancing that isn't just white guys with spiky hair listening to Richie Hawtin... It’s like the dancing that kids do. It’s something more important than this Mixmag and ecstasy scene."



Words: Marcus Siddall

Tune: Caribou - Bowls (James Holden Remix)

http://www.jamesholden.org

http://www.myspace.com/iamtherealjamesholden

- - - - - - - - -