You can do so much with electronic music. Well, I guess you can do a lot with acoustic instruments, but when you've got to the point of playing a guitar with a flute or something you should probably stop flogging that horse. True experimentalism happens with instruments mainly through electronic means. So imagine what you can do with a purely electronic sound. With a pioneering spirit and a lot of curiosity, playing around with electronic music must be second nature.
It seems so with London-based producer Jon Hopkins - the fact that he became a long time collaborator with Brian Eno (the so-called king of experimental electronic music), after Eno heard and liked his music, should tell you something at least. What it tells you, I dunno, but it told me that he must be good. And he is. Just listen to his new track 'Open Eye Signal'.
The track is mesmerising. It sucks you right into its groove, the relentlessly pulsating bass pushing it onwards and being the engine for the whirlpool which drags you further and further in. Hypno-electro. If that's a thing. Maybe it can be a thing. Anyway, the song builds up from its basic foundations, the slightly off-kilter beat mixing regular snare sounds with snares that sound as if they have been ripped open. Soon sheets of delicate ambient noise filter through the ruptured modulating main and provide the whole thing with a shining-gold atmosphere - lovely.
The track morphs in the last quarter of its duration into something dirtier, something with more teeth and less pretty ambience. The synth is messed around with, tussled, distorted, pulled this way and that, the percussion as good as disappears leaving a maraca sound to keep time. It's a very long outro, if you could call it that, but it is just as fabulous as the rest of the song.
If you liked this, I'm sure there will be more brilliance on Jon Hopkins upcoming album Immunity, out 3rd June on Domino.
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