James Holden started his career as the sort of producer-DJ who would pepper his output of melodic techno anthems with the occasional official remix for Madonna or Britney Spears. In light of his later releases, it’s a marvel that he was ever allowed so close to the pop pantheon. On albums like 2013’s classic The Inheritors and its 2017 full-band followup The Animal Spirits, he imagined a post-apocalyptic dancefloor where lichens hang from the rafters and the few remaining souls rave in ritualistic communion with the natural world.
Six years later, Holden is back to acting as a producer rather than a bandleader, with breakbeats and synth stabs on his nearly 10-minute new single “Contains Multitudes” replacing the live drummer and free-jazz horn section of his last album. Though the sounds are a good deal looser than his precision-engineered early hits, this is closer to straightforward club fare than anything he’s released in the last decade.
At first, anyway. As “Contains Multitudes” progresses, entropy takes hold. Melodies grow and propagate like fungi; a bassline punches in and out with gleeful disregard of any obligation to hold down a repeated groove. (His upcoming album arrives with the title Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities, a clear signal that he hasn’t quite shorn his music of its shaggy hippie locks.) Eventually, the drums dissolve entirely, and the track’s second half succumbs to an overgrowth of chattering piano and droning strings. Ultimately, “Contains Multitudes” feels like the comedown from a psychedelic trip: You may be coming back to civilization, but you’ve seen some things out there that will stay with you for a long time.
