Buzzin Electronic Music

Jon Hopkins – Insides – album review

Jon Hopkins: Insides

Jon Hopkins’ rise to fame has occurred largely to his extensive work on Coldplay’s most recent record Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends. His current single ‘Light Through Veins’ went on to be used on Coldplay’s single  ‘Life In Technicolor’, whilst he co-produced various other parts of their album.

Along with producing he creates a lot of electronic compositions, incorporating elements of piano, his primary instrument. Insides is his third album, and first for Double Six records.

It is a work of electronica that is made with the meticulousness of a classical composer, and in fact Jon Hopkins was a classically trained pianist at the Royal Academy of Music before going on to become a bedroom dance music obsessive. Each element on Insides is carefully placed for maximum effect, and the album works like an opus, with areas of light and dark, of abrasiveness and calm permeating the ten tracks.

Insides is a purist’s piece of work, too. Featuring no vocal samples, it plays with heavy, aggressive bass rumbles contrasted against ethereal piano parts (‘Insides’ and ‘Autumn Hill’); it features languishing, drawn-out synths against the blips of electronica (‘Vessels’). Certain tracks are ambient (opener ‘The Wider Sun’), whilst others are like the electronics for some kind of epic stadium rock band ( ‘Wire’).

Some even take more from the drum and bass scene than the kind of Four Tet/Boards Of Canada groups you would class as among his contemporaries. ‘Colour Eye’, for instance, has relentless, pumping, fast-paced beats. On ‘The Low Places’ and ’A Drifting Up’, it is most obvious that there is an affiliation with Boards of Canada’s trippy electronica.

All of it is the work of a precocious talent, and you can see why Hopkins has been enlisted by such a big group as Coldplay to add his expertise to their songs. He has also worked with King Creosote, and it was when working with him that he was inspired to create this new album.

It is odd hearing ‘Light Through Veins’ without the entry of Chris Martin and the gang, and this is the only sticking point on Insides, an album which is so accomplished that it is hard to believe he is still so unknown as a solo artist.

Here is Jon Hopkins’ MySpace.