Opalescent, the debut album from the Mercury Music Prize and Ivor Novello award-nominated artist Jon Hopkins, is to be remastered and reissued for its 15 year anniversary on August 26, 2016.

Sought after among Jon’s hardcore fans, who have repeatedly demanded a remastered vinyl version, the seminal album will finally be available as a special edition gatefold LP with brand new liner notes.

Back in 2001, the process of creating Opalescent was a joyful one. At the age of 20, Jon had just signed to ambient label Just Music who bought him a PC, and with a hotchpotch of software and some basic equipment, he set to work. His only assistance came from his friend and regular collaborator Leo Abrahams, who plays Opalescent’s guitars.

But while the album was a series of tentative steps, it is also already recognisably the work of Jon Hopkins. In the hypnotic minimalism of “Private Universe” (a precursor to “Light Through The Veins” on Insides), or the dense gloaming of the title track, elements of the drum & bass, classical and soundtrack influences that have come to define Jon’s work were clearly asserting themselves. In its passages of drone music, its use of repetition, its cinematic scale, its stark piano lines, the album is an audible antecedent of the very different Immunity—Jon’s recent breakthrough album.

Hopkins currently has an audience waiting in anticipation for his fifth album, a work that he is determined to take as far out-there as he can—and Opalescent is the perfect primer.

Tracklisting:

01.Elegiac
02. Private Universe
03. Halcyon
04. Opalescent
05. Lost in Thought
06. Fading Glow
07. Apparition
08. Inner Peace
09. Cerulean
10. Grace
11. Cold Out There
13. Afterlife

Opalescent (already available on CD & Digital) is available to pre-order on vinyl via the Just Music Store.