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| Track list: 1. Circle 2. Second Sense 3. Contact Note 4. Searchlight 5. Symmetry 6. 100 7. Glasstop 8. Sleepwalker 9. Reprise 10. Nightjar 11. Black and Red 12. Luna Moth Running time: 61 minutes Released: 2004 |
OK, so I'm actually excited to give this one a listen. I don't think I've ever really given much time to Contact Note before, but I love Jon Hopkins' work (and am annoyed that my pre-order of the physical release of Singularity hasn't shown up yet; Amazon seem to be losing the plot slightly of late). My challenge to myself is to do this on a weeknight; did I?
Incidentally, I love the cover of this one. The lighting, the colours and the image all. That said, given the choice of subject I do wonder why the album wasn't named after the final track.
I did not manage to make this midweek in the end, and I found myself putting in two inserts before it after a couple of new purchases, but it feels like it could be a good album to round off a sunny weekend. Circle has a simple rhythmic loop that is easy to get sucked into whilst Hopkins weaves patterns over it. It feels optimistic, but it loses its way a bit when the structure that did so much to bring me in to the track is swapped out for another, leaving the latter part of the track feeling stale and distant. Its a perfect example of my fickleness I guess; it wasn't a seismic shift or anything, but it was enough for it to lose me.
I am rather disappointed by the opening to Second Sense too... not only do I not get on with the vocal insertions but it is a little too rhythm-led this time, and those rhythms can't sustain much on their own. It gets better when there's more melody added, or tuned up perhaps.
I discovered Jon Hopkins not through electronica, but through his production of low-fi Scottish indie peeps. Now Hopkins is well known for his collaboration with King Creosote, but it was his work on And the Racket They Made (from Bombshell) that really resonated with me, some years before Diamond Mine appeared. There it was his use of space more than anything else, the sparseness, the knowledge of when to dial back and support. I hear the roots of that sparseness here. Sure, there is always something going on, but there are passages when one element or other drops out or reduces to a low level that make you consider what was there, or what might be there.
I like, too, that Hopkins can take you on a journey, and may be specifically looking to do so if I recall discussion of a later work, Immunity, correctly. There it applied to the whole album, mirroring the structure of a night out, here I apply that more at the single track level.
I found this last night, too; putting thoughts to words to describe music dominated by electronic elements is surprisingly hard. Describing some of the sounds defies words, and you can't fall back on mentioning the instrument part either, because there's nothing there to identify in the same way that more... organic(?) music has. Don't get me wrong, I am not claiming for a second that non-electronic music has any primacy of place or anything like that, just suggesting that it is probably easier to describe.
There are some very different sounds on this disc, tonally I mean. 100 comes across bright and radio-friendly, almost "pop-y" which is a bit of a tonal jump. It's a good one though, breathing a life into the middle of the disc with its bold central theme. I am surprised to find I've only listened to it 6 times before as it is immediately familiar, the kind of track that could easily become an earworm. Tomorrow, as well as work I am expecting a delivery of English wine (it's getting better, they say...) and a man coming to fix my fence. It'll be nice to gain back a feeling of space in my back garden, especially given the fantastic bright, dry May we seem to have had this year. If I could bottle a day like today and carry it with me... warm but not too warm, bright, blue, full of life.
Enough whimsy. Except that the music seems to have gone that way, too... all plinky strings and xylophones.
Personally, I can't help but feel Hopkins is at his best when understated and downtempo. That isn't to say that he can't make some great tunes with more life in, but there are plenty of people who do that really well. Crafting truly engaging tracks that suit less full on moods and moments takes effort. It's easy to get tone in the right ballpark, but few manage to elevate that into something truly enjoyable in the way Jon Hopkins does. I know it's not on this disc, but I remember when I got Immunity and first heard the title track... I was absorbed, smitten. It probably helped that it includes a re-imagining of a King Creosote tune, again, and that it took me far too long to pin down what, so I had to listen to it over and over to confirm that it wasn't just similar to, but actually was the main lyric from Carbon Dating Agent (which I always loved, but since has become one of my all time favourite tracks).
I seem to be writing about anything except what I am hearing, but this has always been about where my mind goes from the music that I input as much as (or more than) about recording facts about what I hear.
There is a symmetry of sorts to this album, the first three and last three tracks have similar but reversed patterns of length, and as Nightjar begins it gives the impression that this will take the listener on a journey in the way that Contact Note did. I hope so, anyway because as it starts it is a little caught in between. Not super-sparse and considered, but not really enough going on to draw interest. On cue it opens up into a really nice simple piano, which in turn fades into more rhythm. It's not a high tempo journey, but it's going to some varied places.
Black and Red stands out as a complete oddity, blindsiding me with a load of found sound, a darker tone and not nearly as much coherence as I have come to expect from this artist to go with the absence of traditional tune, rhythm and structure. There must be a story behind this track - which ends with perhaps the most chilled sound of all of them - because it's so utterly out of place in other respects.
By ending as it does Black and Red dovetails nicely into the final track, a dreamy and ethereal number that I might appreciate more in another mood, or on another day. And that is all I could think of to write in those final 5 minutes... it must be time to start thinking about sleep and the week to come.
I did not manage to make this midweek in the end, and I found myself putting in two inserts before it after a couple of new purchases, but it feels like it could be a good album to round off a sunny weekend. Circle has a simple rhythmic loop that is easy to get sucked into whilst Hopkins weaves patterns over it. It feels optimistic, but it loses its way a bit when the structure that did so much to bring me in to the track is swapped out for another, leaving the latter part of the track feeling stale and distant. Its a perfect example of my fickleness I guess; it wasn't a seismic shift or anything, but it was enough for it to lose me.
I am rather disappointed by the opening to Second Sense too... not only do I not get on with the vocal insertions but it is a little too rhythm-led this time, and those rhythms can't sustain much on their own. It gets better when there's more melody added, or tuned up perhaps.
I discovered Jon Hopkins not through electronica, but through his production of low-fi Scottish indie peeps. Now Hopkins is well known for his collaboration with King Creosote, but it was his work on And the Racket They Made (from Bombshell) that really resonated with me, some years before Diamond Mine appeared. There it was his use of space more than anything else, the sparseness, the knowledge of when to dial back and support. I hear the roots of that sparseness here. Sure, there is always something going on, but there are passages when one element or other drops out or reduces to a low level that make you consider what was there, or what might be there.
I like, too, that Hopkins can take you on a journey, and may be specifically looking to do so if I recall discussion of a later work, Immunity, correctly. There it applied to the whole album, mirroring the structure of a night out, here I apply that more at the single track level.
I found this last night, too; putting thoughts to words to describe music dominated by electronic elements is surprisingly hard. Describing some of the sounds defies words, and you can't fall back on mentioning the instrument part either, because there's nothing there to identify in the same way that more... organic(?) music has. Don't get me wrong, I am not claiming for a second that non-electronic music has any primacy of place or anything like that, just suggesting that it is probably easier to describe.
There are some very different sounds on this disc, tonally I mean. 100 comes across bright and radio-friendly, almost "pop-y" which is a bit of a tonal jump. It's a good one though, breathing a life into the middle of the disc with its bold central theme. I am surprised to find I've only listened to it 6 times before as it is immediately familiar, the kind of track that could easily become an earworm. Tomorrow, as well as work I am expecting a delivery of English wine (it's getting better, they say...) and a man coming to fix my fence. It'll be nice to gain back a feeling of space in my back garden, especially given the fantastic bright, dry May we seem to have had this year. If I could bottle a day like today and carry it with me... warm but not too warm, bright, blue, full of life.
Enough whimsy. Except that the music seems to have gone that way, too... all plinky strings and xylophones.
Personally, I can't help but feel Hopkins is at his best when understated and downtempo. That isn't to say that he can't make some great tunes with more life in, but there are plenty of people who do that really well. Crafting truly engaging tracks that suit less full on moods and moments takes effort. It's easy to get tone in the right ballpark, but few manage to elevate that into something truly enjoyable in the way Jon Hopkins does. I know it's not on this disc, but I remember when I got Immunity and first heard the title track... I was absorbed, smitten. It probably helped that it includes a re-imagining of a King Creosote tune, again, and that it took me far too long to pin down what, so I had to listen to it over and over to confirm that it wasn't just similar to, but actually was the main lyric from Carbon Dating Agent (which I always loved, but since has become one of my all time favourite tracks).
I seem to be writing about anything except what I am hearing, but this has always been about where my mind goes from the music that I input as much as (or more than) about recording facts about what I hear.
There is a symmetry of sorts to this album, the first three and last three tracks have similar but reversed patterns of length, and as Nightjar begins it gives the impression that this will take the listener on a journey in the way that Contact Note did. I hope so, anyway because as it starts it is a little caught in between. Not super-sparse and considered, but not really enough going on to draw interest. On cue it opens up into a really nice simple piano, which in turn fades into more rhythm. It's not a high tempo journey, but it's going to some varied places.
Black and Red stands out as a complete oddity, blindsiding me with a load of found sound, a darker tone and not nearly as much coherence as I have come to expect from this artist to go with the absence of traditional tune, rhythm and structure. There must be a story behind this track - which ends with perhaps the most chilled sound of all of them - because it's so utterly out of place in other respects.
By ending as it does Black and Red dovetails nicely into the final track, a dreamy and ethereal number that I might appreciate more in another mood, or on another day. And that is all I could think of to write in those final 5 minutes... it must be time to start thinking about sleep and the week to come.
