Jon Hopkins – Ritual

We’re at a point where it’d almost be disappointing if Jon Hopkins‘ latest work wasn’t built around a higher concept. Over the last twenty three years, his obsession with sound has been academic, technical, classical, exploratory and experimental. It’s taken him from all-consuming studio sessions to Ketamine trips in Amazonian caves to becoming an unassuming poster boy for a growing techno-chemical genre specifically designed to explore your mind in altered states.

His 2021 album, Music for Psychedelic Therapy, did just that. Timed to span the length of a Ketamine trip, Hopkins intentionally created a wide open space with audio cues grounded in nature to help guide the mind as it wondered. Whether you listen to that album on ket, psilocybin or other psychotropic drugs currently being pushed to the forefront of mental health and therapy treatments, or if you don’t necessarily believe in the benefit of exploring the metaphysical, it’s a reflection of Hopkins himself, integrating his own experimentation with psychedelic states, meditation and hypnotherapy into an increasingly cerebral creative process.

And while he’s spoken about the intent of creating music to reach a transcendent state, he’s also intentionally taken his time and given each album release a chance to breathe before returning with something fresh. But there is continuity too. Whereas 2013’s Immunity was pulsing and intense, propelled by a focused brutality, 2018’s Singularity opened up, combining rugged techno with something more reminiscent of meditation and trance states. Then the aforementioned Music for Psychedelic Therapy (2021) opened things up even more, trading breathing room for a vastness that could be coloured whichever way you wanted it to be and incorporated the musings of the late spiritual leader Ram Dass. Ritual feels like a transcendent amalgamation of the three. It’s cavernous and bombastic, delicate and reflective, destructive, engulfing and absolutely gargantuan when it hits its stride. 

‘part i – altar’ opens with a primal hum and monastic energy, the soundtrack to a shadowy space between worlds in an Assassin’s Creed loading screen. It bleeds into the arpeggio shimmer of ‘part ii – palace/illusion’ before the momentum takes a sharper ascent on ‘part iii – transcend/lament’. Then, like a storm rolling in on a sunny day, ‘part iv – the veil’ kicks in with a thunder clap and the atmosphere changes with heavy toms and the crackle of electricity in the air. Here, Hopkins is in his element, letting the pressure and anticipation build before ‘part v – evocation’ growls and writhes into life, a force of nature gorging and growing with every hypnotic loop, a hostage to a teasing, infinite rotation that feels like the climax will never arrive. But it does and when it does, it hits with force in the raging ‘part vi – solar goddess return’, crushing and condensing all of that driving, grinding, slow built glower into one supreme detonation.

At some stage, you can’t say for sure where ‘part v – evocation’ becomes ‘part vi – solar goddess return’ or the exact moment everything shifted into the more Solaris-sounding, Andrei Tarkovsky expanse of ‘part vii – dissolution’, but there’s a feeling of inevitability and guidance, that you’re always exactly where you’re supposed to be. And after all of the tumult, we’re into the calm, basking in the celestial warmth of ‘part vii – dissolution’, decompressing in the ambient piano twinkle of ‘part viii – nothing is lost’ left to reflect on the beautiful aftermath.

An album of ascension, Ritual demonstrates that Hopkin’s greatest ability is simply the invitation to sit and ponder – whether it’s getting lost in a hypnotic loop, buried in electronic rage or created to send you on a journey. Whatever he chooses to explore, be it higher states, higher concepts or higher consciousness, the end result is always profound. A master at work.