The rise and fall of Jon Hopkins’ new LP, Singularity, is heartwrenching.

A sound bath suitable for a live club setting as much as it’s apt for a soothing sit down and reset of the mind, it is Hopkins first work in five years. Paradoxically, the album lends itself twofold to its listener, as Hopkins is equally as rhythmic as he is meditative. Singularity‘s a sound union of his ambient 2001 LP Opalescent and the rumbling bass that comprises 2013’s Immunity.

Though there are still elements indebted to the ambient gods before him — like Brian Eno in the track “Recovery,” and even his production work with Coldplay, too — Hopkins’ fifth full-length approaches ambient music with infinite possibilities for what the genre can be. He moves as freely from the mercurial undulations of techno, and what he’s described to NPR as his own “version of trance,” as he does his paintings of psychedelic piano bridges and acoustic arrangements.

Perhaps its Hopkins ability to tap into the fickle nature of human emotion that sets his music vastly apart from his contemporaries, but Singularity seeps a calming complexity — even in its moment of techno tumultuousness —  which remains largely unparalleled in the modern dance sphere. As the LP nears its end and notes become increasingly fleeting; the birth, and now death of his body of work, lends a clear and calm head. One could imagine this is just as Hopkins had hoped.

Tags: jon hopkins, Singularity

Categories: Music