James Holden has never been one to toe the party line, and for that he’s something of a hero for many ITMers. Perhaps due to his reluctance to leave his studio and travel 24 hours down here – something he discussed in his last chat with inthemix – we might be waiting a while for the Border Community boss to tour again. What we can look forward to, though, is a new James Holden album, as he revealed to the Miami New Times blog this week.

“I’ve been busy,” he told the paper, before getting all Holden on them. “I had my 40 days and nights in the desert thing going on for a while – locked up working out the axioms and limits of a new sound. Next year, there will be a record from me. I’m already proud of myself and I haven’t even finished.”

As you can read in the full transcript, he’s got plenty of sagely points to make about the dangers of nostalgia and deference to technology in electronic music. He also goes a little deeper into his studio process. “I don’t really use many soft synths or computer effects at the moment, just recording live takes from the ‘real’ instruments. There are good soft synths, but I don’t like clean music. It isn’t some sort of objective higher value I’m creating, it’s just what I like – wooly, loose, animalistic music. What you hear actually happened. For me, that’s like the ultimate achievement – the intangible realism.”

It should come as no surprise, either, that he’s no more enamoured with genre tags than he’s ever been. “Trance, the genre, might have become conservative corny shit, but in my opinion, so has techno and house,” he offers. “And dubstep’s on the way. Doesn’t mean all trance, techno, house, dubstep is shit. Just genre music generally tends towards a bucket of effluent about a year after a journalist first puts a name to it. Trance is the most wonderful idea of them all, a word that describes everything from African music to Detroit techno to Steve Reich.”

Have a watch of the DJ and his custom-made controller at work in this high-quality video from his Awakenings Festival set in June. So, yes: new James Holden album!