One of the best things about getting free stuff is the press releases that come attached. Typically they’ll start with the awful phrase “xxx xxx is a man who knows no bounds”.
However, even we have to sometimes use phrases we hate to describe various things. In this case, Jon Hopkins is a man who is makes stunning electronica.
We’d like to leave it there with a link to click, but we feel that Jon Hopkins deserves as much praise as possible. After all, you may not know it, but you quite likely already own one of Jon Hopkins’ songs. Confused? Of course you are. Surely you would never purchase something by someone you’ve never heard of. Everything unknown is rubbish. Isn’t it?
For better or for worse, the majority of people have heard of Coldplay. Once they were geeky students and now they’ve progressed to being geeks who will take over from Bono one day as pop music preachers. But would Coldplay ever borrow somebody else’s song because they liked it so much? Of course, the hardcore following will disagree. Lifted from his MySpace:
“In fact, Coldplay were so taken with Light Through the Veins – the first single from Hopkins’ new album Insides – that they used a reworked version to bookend last year’s bestselling Viva La Vida and persuaded the 28-year-old Londoner to spend the last six months of 2008 opening their live shows across the USA, Europe and Japan.”
Still unconvinced? Listen to Light Through The Veins and it will pretty much cement that fact. It isn’t just Coldplay who are fans of Jon Hopkins. Other notable artists include Underworld, Herbie Hancock and the ambient legend that is Brian Eno. The latter being who Hopkins is closely being compared to.
But everything isn’t just a swirling ambient cloud that eventually breaks into a plummet of piano and acoustic backing. Vessel, for example, starts off with evocative synths before painfully building and lulling you into thinking that it’ll fizzle out without any bite. Don’t switch it off – wait until the last forty seconds where the computer noises kick in. Unsure by what we mean by that? Well to be honest, it’s a term we just learned, but it sounds clever and it’s an accurate summary of what happens towards the end when things go epically mental.
That’s enough of us babbling on. We’re going to run down the High Street making loud machine type noises.
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