He takes his young mind to Stravinsky when he was stoned. Creating an album to enhance a ketamine treatment session. He releases two more LPs that pay tribute to tripping on mushrooms and rolling on MDMA. Few artists are as honest about the chemical elements of electronic music as Jon Hopkins, and even fewer can capture these reality-altering emotions in pieces of music. His style of techno is shape-shifting and time-warping, with pitch-ready atmospheres and larger-than-life textures. (This is a producer who opened for Coldplay, after all.) Hopkins makes music for people who aren't necessarily in the club—you could imagine his albums being played in a planetarium, Pink Floyd-style, as well as on his soundtrack heaving festival crowds where he thrives.
Making music for raucous live shows seems to be the furthest thing from Hopkins' mind these days. His recent turn to ambient music has placed his work in a controlled environment, sealing the wild abandon of his historic LPs. Impunity and Uniqueness. Recent tracks with fellow electronic musician HAAi touched on past glories, but Ritualhis seventh album, digs in on his heels with a 41-minute ambient-inclined composition that's not far removed from his disappointing 2021 Music for psychedelic therapy. Ritual it's Hopkins' most epic record, but also his most two-dimensional, honing his thrilling highs and lows over a long build and release.
Like his latest LP, Ritual has its roots in a psychedelic experiment: the Dreamachine, a modern reimagining of a 1959 invention that used flickering lights to trigger graphics when users closed their eyes. The latest version is marketed as both entertainment and therapy, and Hopkins is listed on his website as the official composer. Like any kind of product with incredible wellness implications, Ritual it's vaguely calming, a particularly elegant Rorschach blob. Do you feel it? Does it work? What exactly should he do? For his part, to match the Dreamachine ethos, Hopkins says the kind of “ritual” intended to accompany the LP is up to the listener. So, in self-care parlance, you should do the work yourself.
Hopkins is joined by a handful of musicians on violin, cello, guitar and vocals, as well as former 7RAYS collaborator and IDM writer Clarke, but Ritual he is pure John Hopkins. All the familiar elements are here: hushed hums, the quiet roll of sustained strings, synths that float and leave steam trails in their wake. The soft glow brings to mind Brian Eno's mid-'80s period, when the ambient pioneer began to stretch out with extended tracks Thursday afternoon and Neroli. A kraut-y beat lingers — “part iii – transcend / lament” sounds like Stars of the Lid in the studio with Last Resort-Trentemøller era—and the lines between acoustic and electronic are blurred. Eventually the slamming beats kick in, though the drums sound more like the graceful movements of a percussion ensemble than the bone-crunching textures Impunity.
