Jon Hopkins, Royal Festival Hall

Taking the stage at the Royal Festival Hall, composer Jon Hopkins will explore his work in new ways

As a composer of film scores, Jon Hopkins is practised at drawing out visual tableaus with his palette of sounds. He collaborated with Brian Eno, for instance, on Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones and his score for the 2010 science fiction film Monsters was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award for Best Original Score.

Hopkins is used to playing second fiddle to visuals. On September 19th, though, his music will take the lead. Playing at the Royal Festival Hall, Hopkins, who also works in electronica, will perform 'new explorations' of songs from his film scores, his Mercury Prize-nominated album Immunity and other projects. Music video artist Dan Tombs and the design duo Flat-e are orchestrating the visuals. Joining them is the guitarist and 'noise-maker' Leo Abrahams, a frequent collaborator of Hopkins’, and the experimental string section Geese. It’s a rich smorgasbord of a line-up that promises to deliver an audio-visual feast of the senses.

The music will have range, too. Hopkins has made ambient (on Brian Eno’s record Small Craft on a Milk Sea ); pop (producing Coldplay’s Viva La Vida); classically tinged electronica (on his solo album Insides ); and techno (on Immunity ). His CV is eclectic - it will be fascinating to see how Hopkins brings these disparate threads to the mixing table come September 19th. But time and again, he proves capable of stealthily whisking the listener away with him to soundscapes both glacially epic and scratchily frantic. His one-off show at the Royal Festival Hall should prove no different.