Few musicians collapse the boundaries of ‘pop’ and ‘high’ art like Jon Hopkins, who is as comfortable working on ambient sound collages as he is producing tracks for Coldplay, never sacrificing his commitment to textured and emotive electronica.
With a pair of all-time great albums under his belt in 2013’s ‘Immunity’ and 2018’s ‘Singularity’, Hopkins has branched out into more conceptual fare of late. Following the atmospheric sound bath ‘Music For Psychedelic Therapy’ he’s come up with ‘Ritual’, another elaborate exercise in soul-cleansing cosmic-tronica.
The album, which was originally written to accompany a psychedelic art installation called the Dreamachine, is essentially one piece of music split into seven tracks.
Appropriately, it mirrors the almost-there feeling sparked by that immersive new age experience: it’s pretty, sometimes emotionally involving, but leaves you wanting a lot more.
Every track contains its own traces of beauty, from the arpeggios on part ii - palace / illusion that gradually bloom into part iii - transcend / lament’s panoramic pulses to part viii - nothing is lost’s truly gorgeous piano keys closer.
But the experiment mainly fails as a result of comparison to Hopkins’ earlier masterworks. Its central structural conceit (splitting one musical piece into seven) means that it doesn’t feel as rich as his previous efforts, which crammed as many ideas as we get here into just one of their tracks. ‘Ritual’ contains multitudes, but fails solely on the basis that we know its creator has even more to give.
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