James Holt is a young musician currently based in Leipzig, Germany, having grown up in Sheffield, UK, and attended Leeds University. Recording dark, industrial ambience as The Lone Bureaucrat, Holt released the Shaded Chasm OST last year, and it’s our pleasure to now premiere his debut album, Survival Behind the Curtain.
Having hopped all over the musical map, Holt found refuge in ambient music, as it “allows you so much space to think, to project your personality onto it and change the entire character of the environment / perspective you’re in. It’s kind of unfinished/indefinite.” This sense of unlimited, borderless escapism is the direct opposite of bureaucracy, a concept Holt is in direct opposition to as The Lone Bureaucrat. In his words:
Bureaucracy “reduces human beings into abstraction, controlling people and, ironically, hiding structural/political/material deficiencies within organizations. And yet we internalize the information garnered and it becomes an entirely inaccurate/convenient and ultimately anxiety-inducing way in which we end up defining ourselves. It has the pretense of being efficient and necessary for the maintenance of stable societies but in fact it leads to pointless work and ultimately makes a mockery of reality.”
As The Lone Bureaucrat, James Holt replaces that mockery with a sound that captures life at its most true and visceral. Check out “Bureau 02” and Zoe Kinross’s video for “Bureau 13,” below. You can stream and purchase the rest of Survival Behind the Curtain via Bandcamp.
The Lone Bureaucrat: Bandcamp – Facebook – Soundcloud
Slow Breathing Circuit: Facebook – Twitter – Mixcloud
slowbreathingcircuit.com 