James Holden has announced details of his third album recorded alongside his newly expanded band known as The Animal Spirits, and above you can hear lead track ‘Pass Through The Fire’.
The six-minute track sees Holden on searing form, turning in a hybrid of trance-infused, kraut folk music, with his band now made up of longtime collaborators Tom Page and Etienne Jaumet, as well as Marcus Hamblett, Liza Bec and Lascelle Gordon.
The Animal Spirits will be released via Holden’s own Border Community label on November 3 and follows on from 2013’s The Inheritors. In an effort to capture what Holden calls the "psychic communication" of a group performance, The Animal Spirits was recorded live in one room together in single takes with no overdubs or edits, in accordance with his own self-imposed dogma.
‘Pass Through The Fire’ is said to have grown out of Holden’s 2014 trip to Morocco to work with legend of Gnawa music Maalem Mahmoud Guinia, captured on a 2015 release between Holden, Guinia and Floating Points called Marhaba.
The track took shape over months of pre-show dressing room practice, with Holden transmitting the Gnawa rhythm to drummer Page with Jaumet adding improvised sax contributions along the way. "This was where I got the idea that songs are just backbones or seeds and the strong ones teach/reveal themselves to the players rather than the other way round," Holden says.
