100 Greatest Songs of the 20’s So Far #32 James Holden – Common Land

Released: 2023

James Holden’s 2023 album Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities had some self admitted antecedents in The KLF’s Chill Out and Future Sound of London’s more psychedelic wibblings, but unashamedly was more of an idea than a finished work. “A song isn’t the recording that starts at 0:00 and finishes at 4:32 or whatever” he told Mixmag in interview on it’s release, explaining that music’s only limiting construct was that of perception itself.

A sprawling record which felt like the soundtrack to one of the most visually mind blowing films never made…High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities was also a playground with it’s roots in the permissiveness of early raves, despite Holden himself being too young to experience them.

Instead it was his late 20th century debut Horizons which formed an introduction. But Common Land took the musical form of a hypnotic lava lamp bubble, a circuitous journey via cavernous dub and night jungle scree until an earthly saxophone breaks though it’s dream laden membrane. A dead man once said it’s just a ride. And by that logic a song is not a song unless you want it to be.