Jon Hopkins – Insides (Domino/EMI)

Author: stereonerd [24-05-2009 12:19]

Jon Hopkins makes the kind of music one almost never hears on labels with “major” distribution these days. The reason, one suspects, is because he helped to produce Coldplay’s latest long player, and supported them on tour.

While Coldplay are one of this reviewer’s least favourite contemporary ensembles, it’s at least heart warming that they’re willing to stand up for artists they think worth more exposure, and Jon Hopkins certainly belongs in this category.

His music harks back to the glory days of “listening electronica” from the mid-to-late ’90s, where technology really came of age for musicians wanting to make exquisitely layered music on their computers. The most obvious antecedents are groups like Boards Of Canada and artists like Ulrich Schnauss. If you haven’t yet heard either of those, please go investigate right now, because you’ve missed some of the major developments in contemporary music.

Hopkins is classically trained, and he’s come up with a hybrid that I’m amazed nobody has done quite to the same standard prior to this: his rhythms and bass and some of the textures are all very electronic, sounding like they’re connected straight to the power grid and them modified. These electronic sounds are quite nasty and could easily be modified to form the basis of some dance music like dub-step. But what Hopkins has done is contrasted them with gorgeous string sections and melodic piano.

On the less melodic tracks, his piano works the kind of figures we’re familiar with from slasher flicks like Halloween; the other, more predominant, melodic side of his piano work has certain parallels with the music on Chariots Of Fire, but it’s less demonstrative than that.

Occasionally, his music sounds a little like Brian Eno’s ambient music, especially those records where Eno collaborated with pianist Harold Budd.

But it’s the CONTRAST that Hopkins gets between the serrated electronics and the more classical sounding “real” instrumentation that makes Insides such a standout release. If the electronics were just the standard hip-hop rhythm track, it would be bog-standard, but he goes for quite a dissonant sound at times, which stops the album tipping into the too-sweet category.

Definitely different, and the recording quality is brilliant. GS

4 Stars