Jon Hopkins

It appears that Pitchfork liked this one a bit more than I did...I did like it, just not as much.

Immunity
Jon Hopkins
Domino


BY JENNIFER KELLY

Jon Hopkins works in a shifting palette of organic and electronic sounds, building glitch-scratched beats out of jingling keys, stomped piano pedals and breath. “We Disappear” starts in the recognizable sounds of a key turning, a door slamming and footsteps, a mundane set of signifiers which morphs, gradually into an abstract sort of beat. It’s the human dissolving into auditory signal, experience melting into synapse flashes, an idealization that is not quite familiar, but feels as if it ought to be.

Hopkins has worked with Brian Eno, Coldplay and, most recently, with the British folk singer King Creosote on Diamond Mine, one of 2012’s most evocative and lovely albums. His work here is far more austere and cerebral than on Diamond Mine, and, paradoxically, more tethered to rhythm. “Collider”, Immunity’s long centerpiece pulses with jackhammer insistence, yet seems to inhabit an idealization of a dance floor, rather than the sweaty thing itself. That sense of Platonic ideal will be familiar to anyone who spent time with Diamond Mine, where the sound of voices, birds, clinking cutlery conjured not just a seaside town, but the idea of the sea itself.


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