James Holden / Wacław Zimpel: The Universe Will Take Care of You Album Review – Warungku Terkini

James Holden discovered trance states as a child, hammering out repetitive chords for hours on the piano. For Wacław Zimpel, Polish folk music and American blues offered early glimpses of higher states of consciousness. Since those introductory ear- and mind-openers, the search for musical transcendence has guided both artists in their respective journeys. Holden began his career as a teenager playing capital-T trance music—gated chord stabs, energy-stoking snare rolls, backmasked cymbals, the whole kit and caboodle—before drifting into increasingly woolier strains of ambient techno and electronic improv, including latter-day krautrock, homages to Terry Riley, and pan-global folk music that calls to mind benevolent UFOs hovering above Stonehenge. Zimpel, a clarinetist by training, has moved through free jazz, Indian Carnatic music, and even a 2020 collaboration with Shackleton, the dubstep convert turned arpeggiator shaman. What the two men’s work shares is an attentiveness to the minutiae of change, and a propensity for sequences that churn like thunderheads on the prowl.

Holden and Zimpel first linked up in 2018, recording together in the British musician’s London studio on a handful of dates—connected by a string of gigs featuring the clarinetist as a member of Holden’s touring ensemble, the Animal Spirits. The collaboration yielded the appropriately named Long Weekend EP, four tracks of rippling pulses and drones built up in live overdubs of reeds and modular synthesizer, one song per day. They return now with The Universe Will Take Care of You, a six-track, 51-minute album that feels bigger and more consequential in every way, folding more ideas, intensities, moods, and dimensions into its freeform sprawl.

Each of the six tracks is tagged with the date of its creation, a neat bit of marginalia that gives us some idea of how the sessions unrolled. The album begins on July 19, 2022, their third consecutive day of recording, at which point they were well and truly cooking. After a brief, breath-catching introduction that faintly recalls the vocoded lead-in to Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman”—and given the title, “You Are Gods,” the reference may not be entirely coincidental—they explode into action, unleashing volley after volley of rapid-fire arpeggios that move far too fast for mere mortals to parse. (Thirty-second notes? Sixth-fourth notes? Your guess is as good as mine.) Burbling and twisting, branching and recombining, they change color as they go, arpeggios erupting out of arpeggios, like jets of water in an illuminated fountain. Holden is credited with “arpeggio clouds,” Zimpel with alto clarinet, organ, and “grains,” but which sounds belong to whom is anyone’s guess—the thrill of the thing is in its overwhelming totality. Occasionally, an accidental melody asserts itself in a sequence of notes that somehow, by some miracle of filtering and timbre, breaks through the blur, but it’d be impossible to track every voice, much less every note; it’s enough to let it all wash over you, a jacuzzi for the mind.