James Holden's Favourite Albums

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"This was something I learned to play right towards the end of when I was learning piano, before I left home; my dad taught me. So it's really in the list because of the score, the notes, [it could be] anyone's performance of it - apart from a dodgy Russian guy I heard playing it too fast on YouTube, not that one [laughs]. This is the oldest on the list, but also the one I discovered first. Although I enjoyed playing it, a massive proportion of what I played in the course of learning piano as a teenager I didn't really think much about. The music's so full of signifiers, and Bach [for example] is so open about presenting how clever it is, it's sort of showy. On the violin I'd played quite a lot of twelve-tone serialist things, and sort of felt the same about that, that it was showy in signifiers and didn't really connect with me in any way.

Debussy was incomprehensible in a way, nothing before had felt like it [for me]; the way he put close clusters of notes together in little clouds, and quite dissonant things that sounded so beautiful. And at the same time as being incomprehensible it affected me, I thought it was amazing just listening to it - it was something I really wanted to be able to play well, not that I ever managed that. Looking back, both those things have stuck with me: trying to make music that you can't understand when you listen to it, that you couldn't work out the score to, that you can't quite see why it's working or why it's beautiful, or there's too many things coming together at once that you can't... It's just a magnificent work. The first piece in it, 'Doctor Gradus Ad Parnassum', the descending section, when it reaches its climax at the end, just dancing down a hill through chords, it's so amazing, the momentum of it. It's hypnotic as well. Basically everything in music that I try and do is in this collection of pieces.

I've definitely drawn subconscious influence [from it]. But there was a point where I realised and started trying to learn it again, and listening, looking at it as a grown up with everything I know now, and trying to understand it. I don't think I really do understand it, it's still subconscious, even though I've tried to 'get it' [laughs]. It's just perfect. There are no missteps in it."

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"It's a good one, isn't it? [laughs] Some records mean something to you just because of the first time you listen to it being really nice. It's so mundane - we lay in bed, drunk wine, smoked weed and listened to this, one summer afternoon. It was just perfect. And that's it; I've been in love with Alice, and this, ever since. It's almost all I've got to say about it.

It connects to a lot of the other music I like, and the whole spiritual jazz world has really influenced what I think live music is. But the Alice Coltrane record I just enjoy. It's not a work record. It's not something that I'm poring over the structure of - it's effortless, or unburdened, like Debussy. It's not Ornette Coleman or something, it's not trying to have a fight with you [laughs]. It's just pleasant. That might be the most 'Ah, that is just a pleasant record' in the whole list.

I don't know what it is about Alice Coltrane's music... I don't think it's something I could do, perhaps: it's a level of playing that I'll never be able to touch, on instruments that I can half-play - the piano, I mean. I guess that's a part of it. And just her manner, and the way it's presented, and particularly that record, it's so complete and whole."

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"This is actually a little bit Jeremy Clarkson. You're playing this in the car, you wind your window down, put your arm out of the window - I'm miming it now, but you can't see. There's a sax solo in the track 'Wolf City' which is my favourite on the album; the whole track's a bit directionless and it sort of collapses into a fog in the middle, it's really murky, and there's oompah things in the background, fairgroundy - it's sort of lost. But then it all just coalesces and collapses back into the most perfect, too-brief climax, around this massive saxophone solo. It should be naff; I remember I picked that track out for something to write for a magazine years ago, and I wrote 'This shouldn't work, the whole thing should be really naff'. And then I went and made a record with a massive sax solo in the middle of it. [laughs] So that's had an influence, without realising it. But the whole thing, it is a good album to drive like Clarkson to, I guess. That's its function in my life, maybe."

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"I can't even remember when I found this, but it's been a mental reference for the whole time I was writing The Inheritors. The best thing about it is that my friend organised a 'listening to music in the dark' night: he taped up all the windows of his living room, and borrowed all his friends' speakers and put them in a sort of Stonehenge around the edge of the room, and put gaffa tape over every LED, sealed the door after everyone had gone to the loo. It was serious, you couldn't see anything, it was complete sensory deprivation. We'd each brought a piece of music to play, and Gemma [Sheppard, Border Community label manager and Holden's partner] and I brought this, which seemed appropriate. Being completely in the dark for that length of time, slightly off your tits, listening to this, it was so instense. That friend is responsible for quite a few of my best musical experiences, but that one just felt really - everyone reported that 'my mind wandered', one friend had had a whole lucid dream about joining the IRA [laughs], which seems flippant but it was real, it meant something.

It's such powerful music. I've read a lot of stuff Tony Conrad's written, and he's big into hypnotism and how the mind can be tricked or hacked, or wants to be tricked or hacked, by sensory experiences like music. I was lucky to see him play at Cafe Oto as well, and that was fantastic, again just a brilliant performer onstage doing something you can't really understand. His improvisation at Oto was so simple - a loop pedal and a violin, but it's the shapes of the music, where it's going, it's confusing: what is this chord now? Where is it going to resolve to? It never really explains itself to you, but it just has that effect. We all felt really changed after listening to it in the dark, it was the closest atheists can get to a religious experience.

I don't think I have much else to say about this record. It's got that thing of being pure and unencumbered. There's rock instrumentation in it, but they don't do anything beyond the minimum - kick, snare - it doesn't have any extra signifiers that would date it or attach it to a certain group of people. It's just tone and texture and shape, and an atmosphere. There's a B-side which I think I've only listened to twice [laughs], I've not even listened to the whole album. Just 'From The Side Of Man & Womankind', I just want to keep reliving that experience over and over. That's perfect."

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"This one my hairdresser told me about. He'd been in Rough Trade and picked it up on a whim. This was a long time ago [laughs]. Discovering it changed everything for me. It's trance, isn't it, Harmonia? It's completely trance. Like everyone does, growing up you pick up a story [from] where you're born, and as a teenager you don't by default think about where what you discover came from, I don't think. But then realising that the best bits of trance had all come from this music, that it had really shaped everything, and that you could go back and not take those wrong turns and stay purer without attempting to make a pastiche... It's meaningless to try and make music from the 70s because I'm not in the 70s. But it is possible to go and retrace these steps, form a new path and make some new music that genuinely belongs in this decade, but is still following those ideas and paths that were laid out. Musik Von Harmonia is my favourite of all those records, I think.

It was quite intense for a while - after finding Harmonia and just getting so excited about it, I just went mad. I read [Julian Cope's] Krautrocksampler and then worked my way through everything he mentioned in it, working out what I liked and what I didn't. Up until that point I think I'd been a bit put off by it, because Can in a way is my least favourite of the krautrock stuff, and that's the thing people would always reference and play and talk about. That didn't seem as magic to me. It's ok, I quite like it, it's not the worst thing ever, but Harmonia... Finding my own subset of that canon, that spoke to me. It was several years, but most of my spare musical effort was spent on that for a while.

[This album] is very repetitive and polyrhythmic and a bit incomprehensible, and some of the tracks fold around on themselves in strange rhythmic ways - I guess that's not really present in the motorik, straight Can stuff so much. This seemed much more different, much more separate from prog rock. That's not just because it's electronic - it's got lots of sounds that sound baroque, folk turns in the background, and noodly guitars happening. I think those baroque [aspects], the little pipes or oboes going on in it - that was the thing that [made me most think] 'Wow, it's so beautiful, it just connects everything up'. That was what started me thinking about folk instruments and folk scales as well, it's all in that record. I owe them a debt. [laughs]"

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"I got given it. It was quite a long time ago, when I was much less far into my catching-up-with-the-past work. I did a remix of Depeche Mode and played at an aftershow for them, and the payment for that was a little trip around the Mute warehouse picking up things I was interested in. I was super curious and grabbed that one, and it was the first thing I put on when I got home. That was a well paid gig [laughs], to get that record from that. It blew my mind. Straight away, mind blown. Then the live recordings, that '23 Minutes Over Brussels' live recording, that just blew my mind a second time. I think I listened to that record continuously that summer, driving 'round London with the windows down and 'Frankie Teardrop' on full volume.

Again, that record's got all these things in it that I like. It's like its own world, it's completely unique, and no-one can copy it or infringe on that territory without it obviously being a knock-off. They really claimed their [space]. Even though it's just 'we're going to play rock & roll on an organ and make it a bit political', it's not massive laborious work to come up with that idea, but it's enough - it was world changing, their contribution. They've got so much swagger. I saw them supporting Iggy Pop and I felt like leaving as soon as Iggy walked onstage. I just thought, you can't compete with that, no way. They [Suicide] made it like that, it's not me being cynical about Iggy, it's Alan Vega with a fag hanging out of his mouth, just oozing whatever it is, amazing. It's captured on the record. It's quite hard [for a record] to feel real, the microphone doesn't capture everything, but that record really has got it."

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"Yeah, obviously I like Terry Riley [laughs]. He's my favourite of the minimalists, if I had to pick favourites. This piece Luke [Abbott] sent me an mp3 of, it was on UbuWeb, which was how I discovered it. I think it's my favourite of his, just because of the cadence being so nice at the end. It's like a Hindustani raga or something, the structure of it, and then the way it shifts every so often, it's just beautiful. It's in Just Intonation and I hadn't noticed; where a lot of Just Intonation stuff sounds strange to your ears, this just sounds natural.

It's interesting that [in minimalism] Terry had the idea, Terry was the original one, but somehow Steve [Reich] is accepted in the canon, the Proms. [Riley's] work doesn't really cater to the classical world. He doesn't really produce products so much either - it's not about scores that musicians can play in a concert hall, it's about his all-night performance which is too long to put on a record. Which is sort of self-limiting; acceptance in the canon is, to some extent, down to some sort of capitalist engagement, otherwise you don't get to that point. I think he's avoided that, and made better works and bigger ideas as a result of that.

That's not to do down Steve Reich. The first time I heard Music For Eighteen Musicians I got back in the car from Gatwick, ages ago, and it came on the radio, but I'd missed the announcement saying what it was. I just got in the car and started the engine, and the first thing I heard was this applause dying away, and then the hour-long drive home was that whole piece of music. To hear it and not know what it was, that was even more magical, I was completely in love with it. But then I discovered Terry afterward, and the procedural scores, like In C, are interesting, but it's his touch when he plays that's really awe-inspiring to me as a keyboard player as well."

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"When I was a teenager, my physics teacher gave me both The KLF and the Trance Europe Express compilation. He's responsible for everything, really. I didn't know he liked electronic music, and at the time I didn't think I did. In the Midlands at the time it was all Tall Paul and Sasha and stuff, and a different social group of people from me at school were into it - I assumed it wasn't for me. But I was making music on my computer, and the music teacher played it to my physics teacher, and then he started giving me everything: early Detroit, early jungle, and then these two tapes, which really made an impression.

The KLF I sat on for ages, and then when I was an actual student I spent ages listening to it, lying around. So it's one of those records which is in the list because it means something to me. Around that time, when I was a student, it was that and Aphex and weird experiential rather than delivery-focused music, and then Gemma was introducing me to post-rock at the same time, and it all just seemed to go together - the sense of place in a Mogwai record is quite similar to the sense of place in this KLF tape for example. That's what I really loved about it, actually. Music and traveling is always a magical experience, but that tape gives you the feeling of traveling even when you're listening to it at home. It's not a complicated thought, is it? [laughs] It's magic that tape, it's so full of atmosphere, and things happen that trigger a whole change of feeling and emotion and sense of place. It's the best advert for America, just because of the radio snippets through it. It's a really utopian, enticing record."

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"Even the first few songs of it - that was the moment when it was like, 'Oh, this is pretty good, isn't it? I didn't even know this existed and it's brilliant, I need to find all the other music like this.' For the sixteen-year-old me, that sort of age, it was the most exciting thing that happened in that whole year. It was such a big thing that I went more into it, became more focused on looking for that feeling, until I realised that you have to look for that feeling in a different way, elsewhere. To someone whom that particular compilation wasn't important to at the time, it's maybe quite a random selection of tracks. But that Black Dog 'Xeper' track was I think the first polyrhythmic music I'd ever really noticed, probably ever encountered; understanding that they'd done something there that was interesting. That was the beginning of understanding what I was doing in trying to make music. "

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"It was introduced to me by Gemma when I met her when I first went to university. We'd lie around listening to one of my records and then one of hers, and talking about it. I'd been to Scotland a lot, and it felt like particularly Ten Rapid and Young Team and the 'Xmas Steps' record around the same time [EP+6] did feel Scottish; it was really from there, it had a sense of place. For me, listening to those two albums really conjures up what it feels like to be in Scotland. I hope that's not reaching too much!

It's kind of a toss-up between this and Arab Strap's first album [The Week Never Starts Round Here]. That had that sense of intimacy and identity. Also, the first time I heard 'The Clearing' in the middle of all the dreary shit on the Evening Session in the 90s, like with Suicide, that was just like 'Fuck, how have they done that, what is it?' It was so jarring, the sound of it, compared to all this overcooked, fake Britpop that was otherwise around at that point. I didn't know about Mogwai until Gemma introduced me, but the connection from Arab Strap into that - that whole little era of a counterculture was really fertile for great music. Mogwai, to someone approaching their twenties, were such a perfect band: they had something to say, their music was punk rock at that point, they wanted it to be that, and they started fights and were political and cared about stuff. That was all okay at that point - it sounds all naive and 90s now. "Weren't they all just interested in making money and getting sponsored by BlackBerry?" [laughs] They struck a chord definitely, in personal development as well as musical."

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"NYC in particular only because, if I absolutely had to choose, maybe that's the one that's the easiest inroute for someone else, but also coherent, rewarding, enjoyable; it's got the qualities of the rest of the work, it delivers a bit more maybe, but it's still wild and free. But really, just put all four [Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid album] pictures in a row! If I'd done this in order of importance, this would have been number one, definitely. It's my favourite thing Kieran's ever done. But also it's the most perfect fusion of electronics and jazz; although I love quite a lot of other people who try to do that, this was the one that got it the most right, it just felt the most natural. Every time I saw them play was one of the best gigs I'd ever seen, and obviously a massive influence on how I've decided to play live, and how I recorded the record, a lot of things I was thinking about. I had a lot of good ideas during those Kieran and Steve gigs, actually, looking back. Every time it comes on random play it's tinged with sadness that Steve's gone now.

[In the live setting] that connection [between them] got so visible. And the way Kieran managed to make electronic instruments into something you could play in a real enough way that a connection was possible, that's his great acheivement in that. Kieran is taking the part of Ornette or something [laughs] in that, and he really delivered, he did his bit to such a brilliant level in everything in that [project]. Live, you saw just how real it is; in the context of all these other records which have been manufactured and sculpted to please you on your first listen, those albums without explanation do seem like an aggressive act.

I think they also shaped how Kieran now records: just going in for a day, just get it done and record it all. That's sort of his production trademark now, and how he got such a great result on the Omar Souleyman album and those recordings of RocketNumberNine. So although it led him to get quite negative press, that was the point where I decided that I wouldn't pay much attention to journalists any more, having read the reviews of that [laughs]. It's an example of how, in this sort of cycle of attention, you can't judge a record like that. Any opinion on it is sort of meaningless in that context. It's only after time, when people realise that it might not just lay everything out for them on a plate, that they might have to forgive it a little bit."

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"In terms of being a great work to put on a pedestal, this is the one from [PJ Harvey's] work. Also the little things: the production, the stylistic aspects, there are no bad signifiers in this one, whereas the older ones sound perhaps just the tiniest bit of-their-era in some of the things they did. But this one is just perfect in every respect, it's daunting how perfect it is. I'm not really a lyrics person on the whole, but lyrically this one I just find really affecting. Everything is tied together; the instrumentation, the style of singing, the melody, all tying in with the lyrics and what she's talking about. There's nothing extraneous in it, even the weirder bits, the bits with other music playing sort of in-key over the middle of tracks - it's brave in how it goes all-out in creating a sonic world and painting a picture. Very heart on sleeve, isn't it, compared to a lot of music I like. She put this out when The Inheritors was almost finished but not released in any way, and I was a bit sad, like 'Oh, she's done a record about England, and it's better than my record about England!' [laughs]. Oh well, never mind."

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"I'm finally going to get to see him play live next year at some point! I'm really looking forward to it. This is such a mindblowing record. I think I got Volume Two first, which is why it's the one I picked; it's the one I fell in love with. But the whole series just works together. Again, when you put on a record and it's like 'This is made for me' - it's got all the things I like in it. The expressiveness of it particularly, the way he uses his instrument is really out there and quite aggressive. A friend of mine, his friend told him to go and see Colin Stetson, and he came back and reported on it, really quite angry he'd been put through that. But you know, that's his opinion. [laughs]

A few of these records [in the list] were from when I was at university, and at Oxford jazz was just pleasant wallpaper for posh people, that's the only kind of jazz I knew existed at that point. But then realising that, actually, jazz is more aggressive than the rock or punk or 80s synthwave things that I thought were the most aggressive music I liked. Even Miles Davis is really aggressive with tone the whole time, even playing a nice song, it's still an affront to people. It's like the saxophone in the Amon Düül record, it's a bit 'Can I get away with that?' That's what I like, because I feel like musical aggression is the best possible political act. The way my friend was so affronted by having been sent to see Colin Stetson, that's good, it's left an impression on him. This aggressive squeak and grunt and animal noise that comes out of Colin Stetson, it's not letting you pretend for a moment that it's just trying to please you."