Jon hopkins piano sound5/31/2023 Singularity begins with a three-song voyage through a realm that’s recognizable from Immunity epic “Open Eye Signal,” one where much of the rhythm occurs in negative space. It beats like a body, but it moves like a mind. It squelches like muck and shines like crystal. The producer’s distinctive techno is coarse and granular, as if electricity were a solid you could grind in a mill, yet it flows in a graceful stream. It also combines many other opposites into thrillingly unstable wholes. Like that breakthrough, Singularity is a beat-music odyssey pitched between acid house and introspective ambient bliss, constant change and eternal return, sublunary and sublime. Hopkins was known as a hired hand for Coldplay, Brian Eno, and Imogen Heap, with a sideline in tasteful IDM records until Immunity promoted him to noted techno auteur. Hopkins keeps hanging these strange planets in wobbly orbits throughout Singularity, forming a universe that pulses with deep consciousness and a sense of endless discovery. A ferrous wasteland of synthesizer overhung by evaporated strings and guitar merge into a remarkably complete sonic landscape - the land and sky of a new world, with its own alien physics, its own genesis and apocalypse. That much is clear as soon as “Singularity,” the lead and title song on his first album since 2013’s Mercury Prize-nominated Immunity, shivers into being.
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June 2023
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