From the UK come James Holden, the progressive dance wunderkid now all grown up. His new album The Inheritors (Border Community), his first since 2006, toes the line between between two currents in contemporary electronic music: hypnotic, vibrant ambient zones and driving minimal techno cut with a snarling noise edge. In line with Eric Copeland’s (Black Dice) recent solo excursions, Holden builds slippery sample-laden rhythms that gyrate and pulsate in oscillating tones, muscular synths and plenty of sub bass. This is no background music – these focused compositions take a hold of you with a powerful force, like an entrancing ayahuasca journey leading you to catharsis. The album begins with soft, hyper-saturated textures characteristic of the UK ‘post-dubstep’ diaspora, but Holden quickly switches gears from a spaced out mood towards a fierce techno beat lacerated with searing synths, consistently ratcheting up the momentum towards mind-numbing peaks. The sheer variety of sounds and styles is stunning but never jarring. One moment energetic sax and tribal drums duel atop a propulsive kraut synth groove, while the next industrial clanks rip a vicious rhythm into a steamy bed of warped noise and haunting organ chords. Holden brings his lavish care for subtlety complex sonic texture which distinguished his earlier efforts, but has transformed the mood from a quiet intimacy of late night bedrooms towards something more assertive and vigorous, charged with an expansive energy. It is a rare thing to produce an album that simultaneously compels you to rips apart the dance floor in a Dionysian frenzy and also discreetly seeps deep into recesses of your unconscious, massaging it in mysterious, stimulating patterns. Check out the stream from Experimedia below, then go get this seminal mindfuck music before it sells out. This guy is simply on a whole other level.