Album Review: Ritual by Jon Hopkins

A work of symphonic dimensions that is compelling from first drone to last - and which takes the listener on a voyage through space and time With each release, the dimensions of Jon Hopkins' music thinking continue to expand. With his successful debut at the BBC Proms in 2023 with Jules Buckley and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, evidence was building that Hopkins was starting to think on a larger scale, and here he presents a suite for electronics in eight chapters that form a single span lasting just over 40 minutes. Ritual was born in 2022 but fully assembled in the second half of 2023 - presumably around and after that Proms concert.

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What is music for--what is its intended use? This may seem a broad or a strange question, but it's one that seems to occupy Jon Hopkins' mind. His 2018 album Singularity, a mind-expanding electronic exploration of heightened consciousness, was his last release that you could call a collection of songs. The follow-up, 2021's Music for Psychedelic Therapy, had its intended purpose right there in its title, and that bore out in its listening experience, too.

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RITUAL was started back in 2022, when Hopkins began composing a short piece that would soundtrack a project called Dreamachine. Presented by Collective Act as part of Unboxed: Creativity in the UK, the immersive experience was a collaboration between artists, scientists and philosophers, who worked together to develop an interactive art piece influenced by the work of British-Canadian artist/writer/inventor Brion Gysin. Adapting Gysin's concept of a "dreamachine" (which had also previously influenced avant-jazz composer John Zorn), the work utilized light and music to give participants a hallucinatory psychedelic experience without the use of drugs, a transcendental and metaphysically eye-opening encounter.

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There was a point in the mid-2010s when London-based producer Jon Hopkins was arguably one of the most exciting electronic musicians in the world. Between his albums Immunity (2013) and Singularity (2018), Hopkins reached new levels of musical transcendence, mixing a thrilling combination of ambient, ethereal sounds with heavy beats and field recordings. While his last effort, 2021's Music for Psychedelic Therapy, possessed all the characteristics of Hopkins' best work, its singular gimmick ran a little thin over its hour runtime, so on his latest album RITUAL, we get his most refined music yet.

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Jon Hopkins has made a remarkable name for himself in the world of ambient and experimental electronic music, drawing upon early training as a classical pianist while crossing over into pop. Collaborative work with Brian Eno led to Hopkins adding ambient textures to Coldplay‘s Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends album in 2007. A more integrated collaboration with Eno and Leo Abrahams produced the 2010 album Small Boat on a Milk Sea.

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Photo by Imogen Barron English composer/producer tilts at transcendence on his latest album Ritual. The title makes explicit Hopkins' epic, spiritual quest for the sublime and ineffable. Hopkins claims not to know what he is doing when he is composing, that it is "a mindless act" during which he is merely a channel. Given his history of interest in and use of psychiatric psychedelics, his ambivalence about agency provides an interesting context for an album that feels tightly structured and carefully constructed.

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