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Having steadily risen in critical acclaim and attention since his 2013 Mercury Prize Nomination for Immunity, it seems fitting for Jon Hopkins to be playing venues as grand as the South Bank’s Royal Festival Hall.
And the RFI seemed like a fitting home for Hopkins’ trademark sound, that experimental ensemble of glitch-based audio barrages and ambient symphonic arrangements that very few musicians out there (with the exception of the likes of Belfast’s Max Cooper) are successfully pioneering. The acoustics meant every bass line reverberated through the entirety of your body, and you couldn’t lose a single note of the more serene orchestral moments that came throughout the night.
After a prelude that followed this Jon Hopkins formula, he progressed on to a setlist familiar to his usual live performances, with ‘Breathe This Air’ being followed by ‘We Disappear’ and ‘Insides’. While one criticism would be that this can seem repetitive for those who have returned to see his live set from previous occasions, it by no means belies the artistry that has gone into crafting this progression, and Hopkins’ masterful manipulation of the tracks through Kaoss pads gives the performance a feeling of uniqueness each time.
The inclusion of his score for the 2010 Gareth Edwards film Monsters provided the set with a more expansive feel, and the accompaniment of two violinists (who felt superfluous during their inclusion in ‘Breathe This Air’ and ‘We Disappear’) made ‘Monster Score’ a euphoric highlight of the night. By the end of the instrumental piano and violin refrain which followed it, you could have heard a pin drop.
One point at which the venue's lack of standing area, and the contradictions in Hopkins’ genre crossing compositions, caused a problem, came during the crescendo of ‘We Disappear’, with half the crowd getting to their feet to dance while the other half remained bemusedly seated. This was later overcome through the standing ovation that Hopkins’ closest song to a crowd pleaser, ‘Open Eye Signal’, brought about in the crowd, but still pointed to what felt like a distinct need for a standing area that avoids the awkwardness of dancing in aisles of seating.
This was, however, bypassed as the night wore on, and by Hopkins’ trance-ish encore the whole crowd was quite clearly in the mood for a boogie.
