A contemporary Sunday Classic, with James Holden’s 2013 The Inheritors; a highly-anticipated return to the production frontier and subsequent experimental 75-minute techno odyssey.
James Holden’s 2006 The Idiots Are Winning LP is absolutely one of the most astonishing debuts in electronic music; vigorous and ferociously-precise techno with just enough human touch to the bleeps and hard-hitting beats. A landmark record. The anticipation for his follow up was as fevered as anyones by the time he did finally reappear with The Inheritors in 2013, but after seven years away this new version of Holden was barely recognisable; he had shifted into something that felt like literal world’s away from Detroit’s techno pioneers.
The very first thing about The Inheritors is Holden’s newly developed mastery of modular synthesis. In many ways, an Oxford University maths graduate is entirely the sort of person who could understand the correlation between wires and timing and rhythms and all sorts of complexity, but the delicious incongruity is that The Inheritors is so wonky and often sounds positively ancient. On launch, the album’s press release projected it alongside the grand album projects of old, with The Inheritors being “a whole new world, a mythology, complete”. It does very much feel like an artefact, something that looks and sounds different on each playback, indebted to ceilidh music and ancient pagan rituals. This was not Techno as we knew it.
Psychedelia, folk-lore, repetition and muffled transmissions from somewhere else. Available on vinyl for the first time in 7 years, The Inheritors is a proper trip.
