UK producer James Holden’s music is the kind of stuff you could recommend as readily to jam-band fans as to serious techno listeners—a quality the aggressively high-minded might take as a slight and almost anyone else should find both refreshing and approachable. Inspired by teenage experiences of hearing rave music through the faint transmissions of pirate radio, Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities compresses styles as disparate as trance (“Continuous Revolution”), spiritual jazz (“Contains Multitudes”), and vaguely Appalachian folk (“Worlds Collide Mountains Form”) into a sparkling polyglot of sound that has less to do with dance music than the utopian states dance music often suggests. And like a good psychedelic tapestry, you can easily get lost in the details, but you can also lean back and let the beauty of the big picture wash over you—and over, and over, and over.
- Nathan Fake
- Plaid
- Actress
- Max Cooper