James Holden may not be a household name, but to fans of adventurous, progressive electronic sounds, the British techno sorcerer and psychedelic shaman is renowned as a genius. So revered are his talents that he’s been tapped to remix some of pop music most eminent stars, including Madonna, Depeche Mode, & Britney Spears, though as this mix demonstrates, his tastes tend more to the cerebral than those associations suggest. Head of the zeitgeist-defining label Border Community which boasts fellow forward thinkers Nathan Fake & Extrawelt on its roster, Holden can count himself amongst that very modern breed of DJ with a special knack for layering the most surprising of records with an unparalleled musical ear. His status as a free-spirit unconstrained by genre or scene is now championed by independent stalwart !K7, who have called up Holden to deliver the next installment in their definitive mix series DJ-KiCKS. Holden’s masterfully eclectic mix includes the first solo Holden single in four years ‘Triangle Folds’, and his exclusive previously unreleased remix of Mogwai’s ‘The Sun Smells Too Loud’. While many of these tracks would be an unlikely presence in a ‘club’ context, Holden wishes to make it clear that this is in fact dance music, even if it hasn’t yet been branded with that label. “If you look at the tracks, you’d put them in different boxes,” he admits. “It is loose and free, maybe more so than if you were playing in a club. But to me this is dance music.” And although Holden does find himself slightly liberated in the album format, it is true that the mix nonetheless beats with a vital lifeblood throughout. Just as the mechanical found sounds of Piano Magic gradually resolve into a tension-building toe-tapping rhythmic pulse, the rebranded reprise of Caribou’s ‘Lemon Yoghourt’ from the Canadian artist’s Manitoba / Leaf label days does suddenly seem very much in line with Caribou’s recently announced exploration of more dance-orientated tendencies. Luke A