Bleep

It’s safe to say that the title of Holden’s 2006 LP The Idiots Are Winning still feels relevant today. The music holds up pretty darn well too. Even with all of his subsequent success, few records capture the essence of James Holden’s sound quite like his debut album. While this album takes its spirit of invention from the IDM lineage of Aphex, Boards Of Canada et al, the music here is more erratic than the work of those artists. Often built from the sort of system malfunctions that crop up in the work of Autechre, Liars and Dabrye, The Idiots Are Winning’s sudden changes of direction mean that it occasionally stumbles onto vistas of beauty - we reckon Jon Hopkins was taking notes from tracks like ‘10101’.