New This Week: James Holden - The Inheritors

James Holden - The Inheritors: This is 75 minutes of instability; it's misshapen, weathered, untamed, defiled, inelegant, disorienting, exhausting. Mr. Holden, a man once known for his trance-y Britney Spears remix work, has now carved himself a niche that most closely resembles the heady abstraction of Actress or Boards of Canada. The grim, desolate vocabulary of techno is here, but it's been ripped apart by a resonance cascade and teleported to the outer reaches of Xen (yes, video game references are appropriate since the opening track "Rannoch Dawn" references a planet found in Mass Effect). Actually, that video couldn't be more appropriate for this record; at any given moment, I can almost hear those hapless scientists screaming for dear life: "It's not shutting down!" More adjectives: noisy, decayed, fragile, nauseating, human. My head sometimes feels like these sounds. Good for 3AM. For me, this is the album to beat in 2013. -ZN

Recommended Tracks: "Renata", "Blackpool Late Eighties", "Gone Feral", "The Caterpillar's Intervention"