Insides — Jon Hopkins (2009)
Written for bodies, arranged for rooms
By Rafi Mercer
Something happens to a room about forty minutes into a record that never lets up. Not fatigue, exactly. More like sealing. The air stops circulating, and everybody stops hearing the music as an event and starts hearing it as weather. Most electronic albums do this. They accumulate. They mistake sustained pressure for intensity, and by the time they finish nobody can remember where they were when it started.
The correction isn't quieter music. It's air.
Insides came out on 5 May 2009, on Double Six, Domino's imprint, written and recorded across the previous year at Cafe Music Studios in London. Ten tracks. Forty-eight minutes. It was Jon Hopkins' third record — Opalescent in 2001, Contact Note in 2004 — and the first where the floor drops out from under him. The earlier two are ambient in the received sense: handsome, weatherless. This one has violence in it.
Two things were feeding it, and neither of them was another record.
The first was choreography. A good part of this music began as a score for Entity, a piece Wayne McGregor commissioned in 2008. Which means much of Insides was written for bodies Hopkins could watch — moving through a lit space, at a fixed tempo, needing to breathe at particular points, needing somewhere to land. That is not the brief you're working to when you write an album, and the difference sits in the sequencing rather than the sound. Music made for other people to move to has to leave gaps. Someone is going to be out of breath.
The second was Coldplay. Hopkins had worked on Viva la Vida alongside Brian Eno, and "Light Through the Veins" — nine and a half minutes, the centre of gravity here — had already surfaced on that album before it appeared under his own name. Several million people heard the piece without learning who wrote it. There's a telling of that story where it's a humiliation. It isn't. It bought the room.
The playing is more human than the genre suggests. Leo Abrahams on electric guitar and hurdy-gurdy. Davide Rossi's electric violin threading through "Vessel." Emma Smith on violin, Vince Sipprell on viola. Lee Muddy Baker drums on "Light Through the Veins." And on "A Drifting Up," King Creosote is credited with humming.
Humming. Not vocals. Humming.
That one credit tells you more about the record's temperature than any tag on a shelf. Two years later the pair of them made Diamond Mine.
The shape is the achievement. "The Wider Sun" opens on strings and almost nothing, two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, and then "Vessel" and the title track arrive hard — the heaviest, most physical music he had made to that point, bass with actual mass to it. "Wire." "Colour Eye." Then "Light Through the Veins" takes nine minutes to unfold and does it so gradually that there is no identifiable moment at which it became enormous. It simply is, and then it recedes. "The Low Places" follows. And then, straight after the densest stretch on the album, "Small Memory": one minute forty-three, piano, alone.
That is the whole design, and it's borrowed from the dance studio. Short breath, long build, short breath. Every heavy passage is bracketed by something that lets the air back in. "Autumn Hill" closes at two-forty and resolves nothing at all, which is correct.
This is why it holds in a room where people are meant to be sitting rather than moving. Dynamic range is the thing most electronic music from that period gave away, and Insides keeps it — the quiet tracks are genuinely quiet, not merely less loud, and the loud ones need somewhere for the low end to go. On a laptop the whole thing flattens into pleasantness. On a proper system, the silences do half the work. You notice the room between tracks. You notice people not talking.
At the time it did respectable rather than spectacular numbers: Metacritic settled at 75, it reached number 15 on Billboard's Dance/Electronic chart, PopMatters put it among their ten best electronic albums of the year. A fair few reviewers were still filing him under Coldplay's producer, which reads oddly now. He scored Monsters the following year. Immunity arrived in 2013 and took most of the credit for what Insides had already worked out.
The 2009 double LP is 180 gram, single sleeve, with a twelve-inch insert carrying the credits. Worth finding.
Play it end to end, in order, with the lights low enough that nobody feels observed. Then notice when the air comes back.
Quick Questions
Was Insides written as an album?
Partly. Some tracks had been written sporadically since Contact Note in 2004, but a significant portion grew out of music Hopkins composed for Entity, a 2008 piece commissioned by the choreographer Wayne McGregor. The dance origin is most audible in the sequencing.
Why does "Light Through the Veins" sound familiar?
Because it appeared on Coldplay's Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends in 2008, before Insides was released. Hopkins had worked on that album alongside Brian Eno. Most listeners encountered the piece there first.
Why does sequencing matter more than individual tracks on a record like this?
Because an album played whole is a different object from a playlist. The effect of "Small Memory" depends entirely on what precedes it — one minute forty-three of solo piano lands as relief only if you have just come through eighteen minutes of weight. Shuffle destroys it. So does skipping.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe here, or click here to read more.
