Inner_Spaces’ spring season, entitled “Immersive Thresholds,” opens with James Holden, British artist and founder of the Border Community label, whose four albums in 20 years have opened access to a new world in electronic music. Indeed, each Holden release is like a foundation stone laid at the base of a specific dimension of sound creation. His debut album The Idiots Are Winning in 2006 is a brilliant, playful and ironic deconstruction of techno modes and clichés with contributions borrowed from IDM and Berlin minimalism. After a seven-year hiatus, in 2013, the musician re-enters the recording scene with The Inheritors, this time reconstructing an archaic folk imagery of his homeland, with ostinati transfigured by the partly massive and acidic, partly vaporous and ethereal sounds of synthesizers. 2017 saw the release of The Animal Spirits. It is a time of personal reinterpretation of the spiritual jazz current inspired by figures such as Don Cherry, Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. The entire album is recorded live with a top band and with the ambition to trace a music without boundaries, capable of blending genres and appearing inherently fluid and alive. Finally, in 2023, comes the masterpiece of a now mature 44-year-old James Holden, Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities, a masterful daydream, a jubilant and fantastic journey into the nostalgic dimension of utopia. It will be this latest work that will form the basis of Holden’s live set held in the company of saxophonist Christopher Duffin in the acousmatic space of the San Fedele auditorium. An admirable synthesis that crosses continents, landscapes, Holden’s own musical stylistic features proceeding in a direction that advances without being able to turn back, as the last track of the album, You can never go back, suggests.

The first part of the evening has an unprecedented character because the acousmatic diffusion of the work of an author almost never presented in the concert hall is proposed. It is a thirty-minute sequence taken from the last of the Twelve Stations by the Hungarian Ákos Rózmann (1939-2005), for many years organist of the Catholic Cathedral in Stockholm, author of several monumental cycles of concrete music compositions with highly dramatic sonorities, with titles often inspired by the liturgy of the Mass. The Twelfth Station composed in 2000 uses fragments of prepared piano and voice recordings made in the studio and then extensively reworked and recombined to represent the drama of the existential journey from a penitential perspective. The author writes in this regard: man encounters various difficulties and sufferings through his wandering. These are forces between which there is an ongoing struggle, to the point that man is unable to control and preside over these forces. He is tossed up and down, helpless, like snowflakes in a storm: chaotic thoughts and feelings, joy and suffering, flowing uninterruptedly like a river that has no beginning and no end. All these are the fruits of our actions.