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This review is part of the Musings Collection - see the index here.
Kev Hopper: Whispering Foils
(Duophonic Super 45s: DS45-CD26)
Kev Hopper (bass, saw, samples), Janie Armour (accordian, organ), Charles Hayward (cymbals), Dominic Murcott (percussion), Sean O'Hagan (guitar, voice), Andrea Spain (clarinets), Ian Smith (flugelhorn, trumpet)
Kev Hopper makes a welcome return, with another album of delicately-structured grooves, ably assissted by a team of guest musicians. Hopper plays bass like a percussion instrument, and surrounds it with sequenced samples. On this disk, he also introduces us to his musical saw, a sensuously gliding thing a million miles from (yet still reminiscent of) the novelty acts which, on British TV, used to grace a show called That's Life.
Hopper's guests are deployed with cunning, so that although there are only seven it sounds as if a different band apear on each track. The quality is very high; Hayward plays an extraordinary piece using cymbals, Armor's accordian turns "Canary Lights" into a deliciously desolate nocturne, Ian Smith's trumpet sounds like a bugle blowing out a reveille to wake "London Bells" from its juddering trance.
The music here is highly rythmic and really rather funky, but with a drifting quality which gives the whole thing a real late-night appeal. Hopper's saw phrases its lines very much like a theremin, and Murcott's vibes seem to loll elegantly about the place, filling the music with little rounded notes, each one caefully weighed. O'Hagan, at one point, plays lazy fingerstyle guitar, occasionally adding sme vocal "La la la"s as if he'd just thought it might be fun.
Hopper is a master technician on bass, using both hands percussively to create sinuous, undeniably catchy lines. He's also an inaginative user of samples, and his musical saw is sublimely Romantic, full of aching, arching note-transitions which are doubtless tongue-in-cheek (Hopper is far from being a sentimental player) but which also really work in the elasticated rhythm he creates. This, as anyone who has tried it will tell you, is no easy thing to achieve, and nor is the marriage of "live" and sequenced performances over which he presides here. This is finely-crafted music which sounnds as off-the-cuff as you like; drop-dead cool.