This isn’t a difficult task with Singularity. It’s nice to give your brain the chance to fully focus on one train of thought, one piece of music for a period of time.” It’s been really amazing I’ve had a lot of responses from people who had tried to listen to, which I get the impression they hadn’t done for any other records in recent times. “On occasion, you come across an album that has really been thought through as a whole. But I think that underneath that there’s kind of an instinctive demand for that attention to be reclaimed,” Hopkins reasons, citing the resurgence of vinyl as promoting the absorption of full albums again. “We’ve gotten used to scrolling away and checking between multiple windows and not staying with one idea. “A lot of our focus has been hijacked,” he concedes. There was a time when that was commonplace, but it’s not like that anymore. As such, it’s an auditory experience that is most richly absorbed completely in one go and Hopkins has candidly hoped for that with its listeners. Singularity is constructed in such a way as to portray an arc, with tracks as chapters written to lead from one to another. Hopkins builds grand set pieces of life and fantasy, where the subtlety of assembly reveals engineering on a whole other level. Look to the video for the galvanizing track “Emerald Rush” -placing yourself in the role of the protagonist bounding and somersaulting through animated forests and night skies is a proper analogy to the experience of the full album. A manifesto on the interdependence of growth and destruction, and crucially inspired by medicinal experimentation with psilocybin (the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms), it’s a pulsing, breathing life form of bursts and quells, rapturous expanses where gravity and hard surface disappear, and patiently built ramps that lure you to a precipice over which sublime, studied sections reside.

You step back, or rather out into its acreage, and marvel at the delivery on all counts of what draws people into what they’re hearing. One could argue quite convincingly that Hopkins’ fifth album, Singularity, was the finest overall record of 2018, just on the basis of the technical execution of an emotional vision. A prodigious piano player from the start -and I don’t know why it’s always so cool to learn of a classically trained pianist using that acuity to locate alternative style -the Surrey-born English producer has adapted the synthesized composition of his favorite records growing up to pattern his own beaming transmission. It has also been a course rich with the creative relationships and experiences that make one envious (Brian Eno, Coldplay) and admiring of the dedicated talent that attracted them. The trajectory of Jon Hopkins, like his sound, has been ascendant.

Jon hopkins piano sound