No one could claim that Jon Hopkins has undersold his seventh album. The 45-year-old electronic producer, soundtrack composer and sometime collaborator with Brian Eno and Coldplay has described the music on Ritual as “a tool … for opening portals within your inner world”, and stated: “It doesn’t feel like an album therefore: more a process to go through, something that works on you.”
Perhaps that’s because the music on Ritual has lofty origins. Hopkins isn’t the first musician to attempt to soundtrack the experiences wrought by beat writer and William Burroughs associate Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, a device that emits flickering light which, when looked at through closed eyelids, induces an alpha-wave mental state and hallucinations: Gysin himself favoured listening to the Master Musicians of Joujouka or – crikey – Throbbing Gristle’s 1980 live album Heathen Earth while doing so. But Hopkins is the first to do it on such a scale. Ritual was originally music commissioned for a Dreamachine installation (that transformed something that can apparently be constructed at home using a turntable, a lightbulb and some cardboard into a “multi-sensory experience”) which took up the entirety of Edinburgh’s Murrayfield ice rink, as part of Unboxed, originally known as the Festival of Brexit. The effect was described in this newspaper as being: “as close to state-funded hallucinogens as you can get.”
