If you ever meet someone who doesn’t like chillout music or who decides that all chillout music is ‘the same’ then you should first poke them in the eye. You should then force them to listen to Contact Note by Jon Hopkins. This is chilled music but it’s richly textured, it’s varied, it’s funky and it’s beautiful. The opening two tracks are truly beautiful music which will calm even the hardest soul (and you they might need calming after being stabbed in the eye) but before long the music starts to shift and take on a more sinister edge with some bass and low tones coming in to scare you. And that’s when this album starts to come into it’s own – the beats start to drift in amongst the chilled music and what develops is a richly textured shifting pattern of head nodding beats inbetween the graceful and beautiful melodies.

If you ever get the chance to see Jon Hopkins live then do so at all costs. He’s so, so much more than ‘just a man and a laptop’ – prepare yourself for dancing though! He’s also got a new album out sometime soon which I’m very excited about.