Live review: James Holden, Meltdown Festival, London 17/6/14

My second trip to this year's Meltdown Festival saw a trip to The Purcell Room for Holden's live interpretation of last year's album 'The Inheritors'. Support came from Not Waving a.k.a. Alessio Natalizia (who's also half of Walls). He had some good tunes and a rather dubious taste in accompanying video clips.

Holden's live show sees him take to the stage accompanied by a live drummer (Tom Page). The addition of this one extra element elevates the show by such a surprising amount that it's about 5 times better that it was on record. The interplay between the two of them is great (they're positioned so that they face each other on stage) and, is weird as it may sound, the whole thing becomes almost jazz-like. Despite being another seated venue there's a great atmosphere (although I did see someone who got up to dance get forcibly told to sit down again) and people get completely absorbed by whatever it is that Holden's doing with his bank of coloured dials and spaghetti-wires.

James Holden & Tom Page, Purcell Room, London 17/6/14

The show closes with one of my favourite tracks, 'The Caterpillar's Intervention', at the unfeasibly early time of 9.45 and we stumble out, blinking, into the still-light London evening. In a way this was even better than the UNKLE show I saw a few days before - concise, compact but still creative, it showed that Holden is a force to be reckoned with and will be for a long time to come.

View of London from the Southbank after the show

Remix of the Day: 'Feeling Good Tonight (UNKLE Reconstruction)' by Therr Maitz

James Lavelle's return to prominence continues with this remix of an act I'd never heard of before. Therr Maitz comes from Moscow in Russia and names UNKLE as one of his key influences, so he must be chuffed to have got Lavelle involved with this track. It's very much at the electronic end of UNKLE's output, and reminds me a but of the Surrender Sounds version of 'Heavy Drug'.



Building up to his curation of the Meltdown Festival Lavelle has put out more remixes in the past couple of months than he did in the previous couple of years. Here's one that appeared a couple of weeks ago that I didn't get round to blogging at the time; the UNKLE Reconstruction of 'Pressure' by UTRB. This one's a lot more like the early trip-hop he used to put out on the Mo' Wax label. It sounds a lot like Massive Attack (specifically 'Protection') and makes a good counterpoint to the Maitz remix above.