Getting his young mind blown to Stravinsky while stoned. Making an album to enhance a ketamine therapy session. Releasing two more LPs that pay tribute to tripping on mushrooms and rolling on MDMA. Few artists are as honest about electronic music’s chemical accoutrements as Jon Hopkins, and even fewer can capture those reality-altering feelings in instrumental tracks. His style of techno is shapeshifting and time-warping, with stadium-ready atmospherics and larger-than-life textures. (This is a producer who opened for Coldplay, after all.) Hopkins makes music for people who aren’t necessarily into the club—you could imagine his albums played in a planetarium, Pink Floyd-style, as well as soundtracking the heaving festival crowds where he thrives.
Making music for rowdy live performances seems to be the furthest thing from Hopkins’ mind these days. His recent turn to ambient music placed his work in a controlled environment, sealing off the wild abandon of his landmark LPs Immunity and Singularity. Recent tracks with fellow electronic musician HAAi touched on past glories, but on Ritual, his seventh album, he digs his heels in with an ambient-leaning 41-minute composition that isn’t too far removed from 2021’s watered-down Music for Psychedelic Therapy. Ritual is Hopkins’ most epic record, and also the most two-dimensional, honing his thrilling ups and downs into one long build-up and release.
Like his last LP, Ritual has its roots in a psychedelic experiment: the Dreamachine, a modern recreation of a 1959 invention that used flickering lights to trigger trippy visuals when users closed their eyes. The latest version is marketed as both entertainment and therapy, and Hopkins is listed on its website as an official composer. Like any kind of product with iffy wellness implications, Ritual is vaguely calming, a particularly elegant Rorschach blob. Are you feeling it? Is it working? What is it supposed to do, exactly? For his part, to match the Dreamachine ethos, Hopkins says that the type of “ritual” the LP is meant to accompany is up to the listener. So, in the parlance of self-care, you’ll have to do the work yourself.
Hopkins is joined by a handful of musicians on violin, cello, guitar, and vocals, as well as past collaborator 7RAYS and IDM auteur Clark, but Ritual is pure Jon Hopkins. All the familiar elements are here: hushed coos, the quiet roil of sustained strings, synths that float by and leave vapor trails in their wake. The smooth shimmer conjures Brian Eno’s mid-’80s period, when the ambient pioneer started to stretch out with extended pieces Thursday Afternoon and Neroli. A kraut-y rhythm takes hold—“part iii – transcend / lament” sounds like Stars of the Lid in the studio with Last Resort-era Trentemøller—and the lines between acoustic and electronic are blurred. Eventually the slamming beats come in, though the drums are more like the graceful movements of a percussive troupe than the bone-crunching textures of Immunity.
There’s a new painterly touch to Hopkins’ layers of melody and texture. He’s a master at gathering tension, and if you pay close enough attention (or hit the zoned-out sweet spot), the trudge towards climax becomes almost tantric. By the time we’re at “part vi – solar goddess return,” the anticipation is nearly unbearable. An organ-like sound whirrs and you wait for that release—and then it just sort of happens, dissolving into immaterial synth washes that eventually curl around a cloying piano. It’s pleasant, yet hardly the payoff such an extended build-up demands, an Erased Tapes-style facsimile of Eno’s space-travel classic “An Ending (Ascent).”
The Eno comparisons are hard to avoid. This music is smooth, classically beautiful, fit for both background and close listening—nothing even an inexperienced ambient music fan hasn’t heard before. It’s a surprisingly safe record given its scale, holding back in its attempt to become a blank canvas for the listener. Hopkins is at his best when he’s lovably melodramatic. Ritual holds down his rock-star impulses and ties the album to a specific time and place, settling for the merely pretty instead of the all-consuming. Richly textured and carefully composed, Ritual is an impressive composition, but for Hopkins it feels rote. It’s like a former club kid settling down to do supervised ketamine therapy. It might do something good for you, but it’s not quite as fun as the unsupervised kind.
