In which James Holden solves the problem of live electronic music

Plus Low End Activist, George Riley, Laetitia Sadier and more

(Photo courtesy of Mira. I think it is by Alba Rupérez)

It was thanks to a quirk in the local licensing laws that I witnessed live electronic music before I heard my first proper DJs. In Norwich, where I spent my adolescent years, getting into music, you had to be 18 to enter a night club; but you could see gigs at 14. Happily, this coincided with a moment - the early 90s - when many electronic producers were starting to play concerts and so I saw a wealth of live acts - starting, I believe, with Banco De Gaia - before I ever witnessed a DJ mix two records together.

I always found the experience vaguely mystical. I never really understood how electronic music was made in the first place - what the hell were sequencers? for example - so to see people crouched over banks of keyboards and other gadgets produce riveting electronic noise before our eyes was a genuine thrill. I didn’t really question how much of it was actually live; if it was billed as a live gig, that was enough for me.

Over the next decade and a half I saw a lot of live electronic music and it wasn’t until my late 20s that the magic started to crack. By this point, a live electronic act typically consisted of one person hunched over a laptop, a minimum of joy on their face, clicking their mouse and occasionally turning a knob on a mixing desk. I still just about assumed they were doing it live, although I deliberately didn’t think about what “live” actually meant in the circumstances. Until one day a well-known electronic producer confessed to me, over a glass of wine at Fabric, that he wasn’t really doing very much up there. He was, he said “engineering” his music, adjusting pre-recorded sounds, rather than actually playing anything live. 

To him, this probably seemed obvious and I appreciated his honesty. But since that moment, in 2005, I have been uncommonly suspicious of live electronic music, particularly when it comes in laptop form. Maybe this is a slightly rockist idea. But it does matter to me that the music presented as “live” is actually being made live to some extent, that there is some capacity for things to change, evolve and even go wrong.

There have been exceptions to this rule of misgiving. Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 tour was a fabulous son et lumière spectacle, where the sheer brilliance of the show’s presentation - the pyramid, the lights, the robot outfits - outweighed the fact that not a great deal of the music was actually being played live, in the traditional sense of the word. (We don’t know what Daft Punk were doing in that pyramid; but they certainly weren’t knocking out riffs on their keyboards or singing hooks live, as a traditional live rock band might do.) And there are, of course, electronic producers - Squarepusher and Sinjin Hawke and Zora Jones spring to mind - who have found a way to inject genuinely live elements into their shows. (Squarepusher’s live bass playing is a hilarious highlight of any show he might be playing at.)

Far more often I’ve struggled to live in the moment of live electronic music, caught up with the niggling suspicion that I was basically listening to a tape. And that’s OK, I guess: your favourite music, played loud, in a room with your friends, is always going to be something special. Plus, frankly, what else could most producers do? If your music is made on a computer, with very little actual live input, you can’t really recreate it with the London Symphony Orchestra. 

(A brief aside: I hate hate hate the Ibiza / Haçienda / Garage classics model, whereby an actual orchestra is brought in, to provide some entirely unneeded gravitas for electronic music, as if Voodoo Ray really needs someone on the live bassoon to make it into a “proper” song. Urgh.)

Last Friday, however, I saw James Holden live at the Mira festival in Barcelona and it proved transcendent. It was, perhaps, the best live electronic music show I have seen in five years, an absolute masterclass in how electronic music can be brought to genuine life in a concert setting.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that it was James Holden who did this. Holden is not just a brilliant, thoughtful, producer, one ready to take risks as to where electronic music can go - see his work with The Animal Spirits or his collabs with Maalem Houssam Guinia, one of the most important figures of Morocco’s Gnawa tradition - he is also dedicated to electronic music as live force, having binned off a lucrative DJ career in the 2000s in favour of playing live gigs. 

At Mira he was accompanied by long-time collaborators Camilo Tirado on tabla and percussion and Wacław Zimpel on clarinet, sax, recorder and percussion, the duo flanking Holden on stage as he prodded away at his banks of electronic equipment. 

One of the difficulties in live electronic music is the way it has to live with certain contradictions and opposing demands. I want the music to be live, in some way; but I don’t like it when electronic sounds, like drum machines, are recreated on acoustic instruments. Holden seems to have found the ideal way around this moral maze: the electronic sounds of his records remain electronic but he surrounds them with the sound of live percussion and woodwind. At times, his live sound is overwhelmingly electronic; at others, the acoustic instruments take the lead. This means that all three member of the band have room to improvise - Zimpel in particular, who I think was a special guest just for the Barcelona gig - without having to throw the recognisable elements of the songs to the birds.

The result is a set of incredible warmth and enveloping intimacy, even when played in a vast conference space in Barcelona. Holden’s set drew heavily on his excellent 2023 album Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities - a title that tells you a great deal about the album itself - with the single Contains Multitudes the highlight, a vast, sprawling, heavily percussive beast that may be the danciest song ever not to contain a single kick drum. 

I would love to know if Overmono, ostensibly Mira’s headliners, were watching Holden’s gig. I really like Overmono: their stadium garage sound has a kind of industrial funk I find utterly invigorating. But after watching Holden, I found their live set disappointing. The Overmono brothers are definitely trying to make their live performance into a show: their visual set up is impressive and they lurch around behind their equipment with a definite joie de vivre. But a faithful recreation of their better known tunes feels like a retrograde step after watching the brilliant exuberance of Holden’s set.

Maybe that’s unfair. The large Mira crowd bugged out to Overmono’s set and you could hardly expect the brothers to pull out the same woodwind and tabla set up that had served Holden so well. But, crucially, I felt that Overmono lacked life, that they play live because that’s what they think they should do, rather than through a particular drive to take their music to the live arena or because they have figured out clever new ways to breath life into their music.

Or maybe I was just getting hungry. In any case, I left.

Some listening

Low End Activist - Glazial (ft. Duppy)

Watching 8 Bar: The Evolution of Grime, Ewen Spencer’s excellent grime documentary, at the In-Edit documentary festival reminded me how much I love classic grime, which, at its best, can be one of the most fiercely obtuse musical forms, all odd-shaped elbows and perverse rhythmical shapes. Low End Activist’s Glazial, for the Rinse label, taps into this, the drums and abundant low end answering to no logic but their own, as they sort of squelch menacingly all over the track. (Don’t believe a squelch can be menacing? Well give this a listen.) This might be hard for some MCs to follow; but Duppy is masterful here.

George Riley and Hudson Mohawke - S e x

There is a brilliant defiance to George Riley’s lyrics here, which are (basically) about withholding sex from a selfish, “gluttonous” lover. And Hudson Mohawke’s furious Amen beat and hoover riff production feels entirely appropriate, resulting in one of the strongest dance songs of the year, one that nods to the past without being restrained by it. How about a joint album?

Laetitia Sadier - Une Autre Attente

The other day I decided I was going to listen to Neu! - a band I know are hugely influential but haven’t really explored - when out for an autumnal walk. As Hallogallo, perhaps the band’s greatest hit, came charging through my headphones I couldn’t help thinking that it missed a certain Laetitia Sadier-ness to it all. This is entirely unfair on Neu! of course. They influenced Stereolab, rather than the other way round. But it does highlight the utter genius of Stereolab’s Krautock plus bubblegum pop equation. Anyway, later that day, as if by magic, a new Laetitia Sadier song popped into my inbox and it was basically perfect. Une Autre Attente has a driving drum beat, organ drone, jazz-ish breakdown and one of Sadier’s best winding melodies, like Stereolab with an unexpectedly groovy bass line. And what could be better than that?

Lee “Scratch” Perry - 100lbs of Summer (feat. Greentea Peng)

Lee “Scratch” Perry is one of those artists who released so much music during their lifetime it was almost too much to properly appreciate. (See also: The Fall). 100lbs of summer is the first single from what is apparently the last ever album from the reggae pioneer - DEFINITELY one of the most important figures in modern music - and it is a rolling, bouncing, totally charming summer reggae anthem, where Perry’s innate oddball-ness offsets a rather commercial backing track.

The playlist

Having added two more likes to my Spotify newest and the bestest playlist, I am now only 33.4m subscribers off Spotify’s most popular list. Assuming Today’s Top Hits don’t add any more likes over the next few millennia, I reckon I can get there just before the sun expands, killing us all. Now there’s a goal to go for. Seriously, though, if you’re after a guide to the best new music on Spotify, this might be for you.

Things I’ve done

Beirut - Hadsel

I reviewed the new Beirut album for Pitchfork. “Condon went to Norway and came back with a familiar tangle of contradictions: Hadsel is a new beginning for Beirut that sounds like old times, a record born of despair and solitude that still feels full of life.” If you don’t have time for the whole record, I strongly recommend you check out So Many Plans, a classic Beirut work of wonder.

Twitching around

Since we last spoke, on the Radio Primavera Sound Twitch we have had interviews with Yung Prado and Medalla (in Spanish) and the astounding Anjimile (in English). You can check them out here. This weekend, at the Primavera Weekender, we are going Twitch heavy, so tune in on Friday (November 17) and Saturday (November 18) from 17h CET to 20h for some heavyweight interviews, including Bob Mould (who I want to ask all about house music) and F*cked Up (who I probably won’t).