Open the wormhole; feel your feet planted on terra firma, and avert your navelgazing toward the swirling tube stop to freedom in front of you. Like an astral avenue of escape, you can feel the dust land on your face that’s carried by airstreams from beyond. The portal’s open, it’s there because you were willing to risk the death of everything you know for the journey.
Are you going to jump?
That’s the place the Jon Hopkins remix of Purity Ring’s “Amenamy” takes me. Purity Ring has a penchant for the fantastical, crafting tracks about breaking open one’s ribs to build a ‘fineshrine’ as a metaphor deep sexual connection or having one’s ‘belispeak’ growls of dissatisfaction with the state of one’s life. Amenamy as a track is as near science fiction though as Purity Ring has explored, mixing galactic and earthly metaphors of struggle, breaking free from the ultimately by offering them to the spirits.
Under the guide of Hopkins’ nimble hands, the mystical elements feel like a swirly, intoxicating sexuality on each note. As soon to be writer for the site—and one of my musical inspirations, Confusionists, put it “Jon Hopkins deserves a Nobel Prize” for his work here. His insights into the notoriously impossible to remix Purity Ring’s original are revelatory.
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