Jon Hopkins: Ritual – cosmic catharsis lacks lift-off

No one could claim that Jon Hopkins has undersold his seventh album. The 45-year-old electronic producer, soundtrack composer and sometime collaborator with Brian Eno and Coldplay has described the music on Ritual as “a tool … for opening portals within your inner world”, and stated: “It doesn’t feel like an album therefore: more a process to go through, something that works on you.”
Perhaps that’s because the music on Ritual has lofty origins. Hopkins isn’t the first musician to attempt to soundtrack the experiences wrought by beat writer and William Burroughs associate Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, a device that emits flickering light which, when looked at through closed eyelids, induces an alpha-wave mental state and hallucinations: Gysin himself favoured listening to the Master Musicians of Joujouka or – crikey – Throbbing Gristle’s 1980 live album Heathen Earth while doing so. But Hopkins is the first to do it on such a scale. Ritual was originally music commissioned for a Dreamachine installation (that transformed something that can apparently be constructed at home using a turntable, a lightbulb and some cardboard into a “multi-sensory experience”) which took up the entirety of Edinburgh’s Murrayfield ice rink, as part of Unboxed, originally known as the Festival of Brexit. The effect was described in this newspaper as being: “as close to state-funded hallucinogens as you can get.”
Or perhaps it has to do with the music itself. Like those of its predecessor, 2021’s Music for Psychedelic Therapy, Ritual’s contents would once have been filed under the heading of ambient music. There are beatless drones topped with twinkling bell-like sounds, whispering voices and echoing, wordless snatches of vocals. A fragile piano figure floats over waves of spectral electronics. When a rhythm does appear midway through, it’s at half the speed of the arpeggiated synthesiser patterns around it, closer to a pulse than anything that would propel you to the dancefloor.
The whole thing has clearly been created for listeners in a recumbent position – as people indeed were at the immersive Dreamachine installations. But few genres have seen their stock crash quite so dramatically in the age of streaming as ambient has. There are endless playlists full of the stuff on Spotify, purporting to provide the listener with all manner of beneficial effects, from aiding concentration while studying and enabling those diagnosed with ADHD to sleep, to calming separation anxiety in pets.
The issue is not merely that this involves treating the music not as worthwhile art but as something purely utilitarian – like the musical equivalent of a plug-in air freshener – but that questions have been raised about the people making it. One persistent rumour suggests that a lot of the artists don’t exist, and it’s all just nondescript waftiness bought in bulk by streaming platforms in order to denude actual artists of royalties. Another is that the dreaded AI may be involved. Judging by the number of subscriptions to said ambient playlists, these rumours haven’t affected their popularity, but the sense that this is music that has become devalued – that finds itself in the curious position of being listened to by hundreds of thousands of people without anybody caring much about it – is hard to avoid.
In truth, it is obvious from the start that Ritual carries more weight than the acres of anonymous mood music out there. No one with a working knowledge of ambient music’s past – from Tangerine Dream, Eno and Steve Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Musick through its post-acid house heyday and beyond – is going to find the album’s opening sections wildly unprecedented or revelatory, but they have an emotionally engaging, immersive quality and a sense of forward motion. This is something you actively connect with, rather than aural room spray. The best parts come midway through, on Evocation and Solar Goddess Return. When an unrelenting and unexpectedly gnarly two-note riff kicks in it recalls Suicide – not the first band you would reach for when wanting a calming musical experience – and overlaid with cavernous electronics, it has a mounting effect that leans towards a kind of hypnotic catharsis, in the vicinity of that achieved by Fuck Buttons’ fantastic 2009 album Tarot Sport.
But while the music on Tarot Sport had a genuinely overwhelming quality, this is noticeably less visceral. It’s a bit mean to call it the Waitrose version, but it never quite builds up to a level of intensity befitting what follows: a slow exhalation-like dissolve into drifting tones. Although what it might have sounded like if you were recumbent in the Murrayfield ice rink, listening in surround sound with the old state-funded hallucinations exploding within your mind, is another matter. And with all that said, the closing track, Nothing Is Lost – home to the aforementioned fragile piano figure – is entirely lovely: a gentle disembarkation from a pleasant journey. As trips go, Ritual is congenial and diverting rather than transformative. But if it doesn’t quite open the portals of your inner world, it’s still worth taking.
Pearl Charles – Does This Sound Familiar?
Pearl Charles continues to inhabit an intersection between alt-country, mid-70s soft rock and psychedelia: the apparently peyote-induced Does This Sound Familiar? is delightfully poppy and subtly strange.