In the intro of his fourth solo album, UK electronic musician Jon Hopkins (prominently known for his collaboration with Coldplay) takes us through a locked door and into a lone hallway where the sound of footsteps quickly merge with the anxious pounds of an electronic beat. A clattering object gets kicked over and echoes into the vast, darkening space, allowing us to realize we have arrived somewhere immense and enclosed. This heightened sense of physicality is the defining element of Immunity, a spacey, hour-long nocturnal glide through glitchy drum & bass electronica and atmospheric ambiances, and it is what lends the album such a powerful sense of disparate existence and emotive solitude.
As the opening track “We Disappear” evolves, adding layers of metallic crush, sudden bass ruptures, and broken transmissions, so does the sense of place; first we are in an industrial room, then a futuristic spaceship, then a heavenly expanse, then wherever else your mind might journey. The fervent bass-dance of “Open Eye Signal” might have been infectious club-beat, but it seems lost and lonely among the hollow synths and mellow echo of trance-like pads. The vocal samples in “Collider” evoke some patient-respirator struggle as dance floor synths leap in and out of the crushed percussion—all of it carries the sort of madness of an irruptive dream.
By halfway through the album Hopkins’ craft begins to wear and feel a little repetitive with its long, looping tracks, though this makes it perfectly poised for the reprieve that is “Abandon Window.” Teasing beautiful piano chords, the song tracks the slow gathering of a dark rumble in a resonant space, which eventually overtakes and transforms into a celestial choir. But “Sun Harmonics” is unfortunately rather forgettable; as a twelve-minute track it lacks the appropriate level of vitality for a dance-beat and shies away from its predecessors’ trance-like ambiances, achieving only a dull stupor of listless noise. “Immunity” similarly lacks vision as well, and the sense of sci-fi space confuses itself in a maze of ambiguous directions, leaving one stranded not knowing quite where they are. Nevertheless, anywhere within the confines of Hopkins’ imaginative sounds is still quite an interesting place to be.
