Feel First Life

The closing track of *Singularity* is the album's exhale, and it barely resembles the machinery that preceded it. Piano — real, close-miked, with the felt and wood audible — plays a simple repeating figure that Hopkins lets bloom into reverb until the room becomes an instrument. Strings enter almost imperceptibly, more like a change in air pressure than an arrangement. There are no drums, no bass weight, none of the abrasive saturation Hopkins builds his club tracks from; what's left is unguarded melody and the sound of decay. The title is doing real work: this is the comedown as a return to sensation, the moment after an overwhelming experience when ordinary things — light, breath, the presence of other people — register as almost unbearably vivid. It's music of relief rather than triumph, and Hopkins resists any final swell that would tip it into sentimentality. It simply widens, holds, and fades. Instrumental throughout, it inherits the lineage of Eno's ambient work and Hopkins' own collaborations with Brian Eno and King Creosote, but the emotional register is more human than pastoral. Put it on at the end of a long night, in the grey hour before sleep, or after any experience you need a few minutes to come down from.