James Holden- Moby Made Me Vegetarian

"Lots of people call Moby a knob for airing his views but at the same time it was from reading the sleeve-notes on one of his CDs Animals Are Not Ours to Eat, Wear or Experiment On, that made me think about whether I should be vegetarian. I've now been vegetarian now since I was 15."

As one of the handful of new generation DJs to successfully join the ranks of the 30 and 40 something jocks still dominating club culture, James Holden clearly has an extra touch, which he shows as much through his ideas as he does through his always imaginative take on house and progressive trance. Sitting outside a Notting Hill pub on a mild winter's afternoon, he's philosophical though about using his media platform for bigger issues.

"Moby caused a change for me personally by writing that on his album, so I have used my platform occasionally, for example, by putting links to stop-the-war websites on my records," he explains.

"Though I'm never sure if using your platform ultimately makes much difference."

Whether it does or doesn't he certainly makes a difference through his music, pushing intelligent, entertaining quality house and trance to an ever-growing fanbase of seriously dedicated fans. Still just 24, the Oxford University Maths graduate, is both one of dance culture's best educated and hotly tipped producers, ever since Sasha took him under his wing, some 4 years ago. He's also deliciously outspoken, on everything from Sasha ('I haven't spoke to him since we did the track, his PA phones me occasionally to get records') and DJ groupies ('they're most male and they don't want sex- they want to be my new best friend').

He's also unusually clear about what he tried to do with his latest (and fantastic) new mix CD, Balance 5, a double mixed up compilation that could seriously revitalise the status (and future) of progressive house.


Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff) : How did you approach making your new mix CD, what were you trying to achieve-

James Holden: "I wanted to CD to hear like the kind of music you'd hear if you were round my house after a club, smoking a joint with me. So many mix CDs try and recreate a club set and surely that's futile, because you're never in a club when you're listening to a mix CD- I wanted to make a mix CD that you can listen to on your headphones when you're walking around London, which is the way that I usually enjoy music. But at the same time the CD takes in how I DJ. About 12 months ago I went from just mixing records together to trying to use my musical knowledge to make things fit properly, rather than just beat matching, which is almost too easy, these days. If you know the key and you know what the notes are you can make tracks lead into each other really nicely so that was the idea. There were a few computer tricks involved, tweaking tracks a semi-tone higher to make sure they do fit. I love mixing keys together, it's almost like bootlegging live. Though for beat-matching I need to get up to the Jeff Mill standard before I can do what I really want to do."

Skrufff: Are you driven to eventually reach Jeff Mills' standard of DJing-

James Holden: "My plan involves cheating, I'm working with a friend of mine to develop some DJ software which will let you do his kind of thing. Beat matching to me seems pointless today, if a computer can do it for you, why not let it do it for you then you can concentrate on re-arranging the tracks, choosing better tracks to play or just dropping better bits in there. The DJ can become more of a human jukebox instead of just doing the one monkey trick of beat matching, which is no longer impressive anymore."

Skrufff: You recently used the term 'punk electronics', what did you mean by that-

James Holden: "I don't use (music making programmes) Cubase or Logic like everybody else does, I use this free software called Buzz which lets you wire up the machines so they can inter-react. So it's 3am, you're stoned, you turn a< Tags

• James Holden