Review: Jon Hopkins “Asleep Versions”

by Brian R. Brinkman

You jump in your car and you start driving north. Your brain is pulsating with a sense of exploration.

The city fades, the suburbs dwindle. You pass through thick, richly colored forests, and vast fields stretching to the horizon. The sky is like a bluebird. The sun, low on the horizon, casts a deep, warm light through everything you see.  You continue to drive.

Past tiny towns, rivers course and weave under the highway. Lakes dot the horizon, and the air cools to a chill as the sky is lit with a pinkish hue. A sense of isolation begins to creep in, and excites you further. You’re getting away from it all. You feel a sense of immunity to the problems of reality.

Jon Hopkins’ excellent 2013 record, Immunity, worked your senses in much the same way that jumping in your car and simply driving does. It’s perceptible and incessantly engaging. Accessible, and yet inherently challenging. Songs like “Sun Harmonics” and “We Disappear” create tension through their conflict with melody and vibrantly abrasive rhythms. It’s somehow fitting then, that his follow-up EP, Asleep Versions, a four-song remix of selected tracks from Immunity, reflects the welcome sense of nothingness you experience when you arrive wherever it is that your drive is taking you.

Billed as a “decelerated and dream-like reimagining” of a selection of songs from Immunity, Asleep Versions is that calming release of simplicity that comes from the post-surge in kinetic awakening. Case in point, the former’s title track that was so dependent on its sonic clicks forward, but here, drifts alone on its blissful melody, pausing only slightly before wafting in a dream-like cloud once more. Perhaps even more startling is the way that “Breathe This Air” remains just as captivating here as it does on Immunity, even without its pulsating rhythms.

Where Immunity demands your attention and reaction, Asleep Versions masterfully presents many of the melodies that so captivated listeners in 2013, but here, simply allows them to drift in and out of their ether. This is the most Eno-esque Hopkins has allowed himself to sound.

And much like Eno’s successes with his Ambient series, here, Hopkins displays the versatility of his melodic interests, and his ability to so totally consume you with less.

Asleep Versions is an example of artistic mastery through the melody. Less is sometimes the best thing.