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Jon Hopkins: Ritual review | Alexis Petridis’s album of the week
Originally written for an installation with mind-altering intentions, the producer’s seventh album is occasionally engaging but dissolves into drift
Judging by the number of subscriptions to said ambient playlists, these rumours haven’t affected their popularity, but the sense that this is music that has become devalued – that finds itself in the curious position of being listened to by hundreds of thousands of people without anybody caring much about it – is hard to avoid. No one with a working knowledge of ambient music’s past – from Tangerine Dream, Eno and Steve Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Musick through its post-acid house heyday and beyond – is going to find the album’s opening sections wildly unprecedented or revelatory, but they have an emotionally engaging, immersive quality and a sense of forward motion. When an unrelenting and unexpectedly gnarly two-note riff kicks in it recalls Suicide – not the first band you would reach for when wanting a calming musical experience – and overlaid with cavernous electronics, it has a mounting effect that leans towards a kind of hypnotic catharsis, in the vicinity of that achieved by Fuck Buttons’ fantastic 2009 album Tarot Sport.
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