SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: JON HOPKINS – RITUAL

JON HOPKINS
RITUAL
DOMINO RECORDS

The meaning extracted from an ambient record reflects the listener’s willingness and ability to project, to amplify, and in turn to receive meaning where nothing evolves explicitly. It’s an echo chamber, a Plato’s cave of synthetic conversation with the self. Jon Hopkins has never been shy about various chemical influences on his compositions and understanding of music. He’s written about getting stoned and watching Fantasia 2000 and how that mind-altered reception of Stravinsky shamed him into, literally, changing his tune. This expanded potential of music augmented his demands upon himself as an artist.

Hopkins often treats his earliest records like a bad haircut in a yearbook photo, which is difficult for fans that evolved alongside him as he experimented with his perspective. 2013’s Immunity announced his official arrival, a marvel of a record, the kind of insightful and provocative electronic music that’s called “life changing” on message boards. (Due diligence returned three mentions of such statements in one Reddit thread alone.) “Abandon Window” and the title track stand out as a career highlights – legitimate cuts in a genre that recoils from such accolades.

In the shadow of that album’s success, Jon Hopkins the artist seemed more comfortable with the bigger idea, the concept, the movie score, the epic work in service or serving the ephemeral. His last record, 2021’s Music For Psychedelic Therapy, inspired by time spent in Ecuador’s caves, dispenses entirely with the intermittent pleasures of ill-gotten melatonin; to expect otherwise is to deprive yourself of the unfettered potential of darkness.

On Ritual, Hopkins returns to the single-minded focus of Psychedelic Therapy. The 41-min soundscape has been given arbitrary delimiters; the narrative formed over its totality. What that narrative is or could be Hopkins leaves entirely to the listener. The title itself speaks to something personal and unknowable. He’s left the nature of the ritual in question purposefully vague.

The now familiar Hopkins orchestral elements return: strings and synth, tone and tempo, reserved and restrained, the building of tension and the releasing of the past. During “part ii – palace/illusion” a bouncy Vangelis synth wades out to test the waters. Later, Brian Eno dons a space suit. A piano teases. Synths darken. The need for drama drives our attention, but Ritual proves to be a cunning temptress, a masochist, if it all wasn’t so damn pleasant.

Therein lies the downside to perpetual beauty, the exquisitely crafted mood. The lack of the pandering crescendo, a bleak crater, the constant avoidance of our expectations, tethers us irreparably to undelivered expectation. While Ritual cannot disappoint with such a rich and welcoming soundscape, the small and constant pings of dopamine ultimately leave us craving a flood of emotion that never arrives.

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