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NPR Music: Tiny Desk Concerts
Tiny Desk Concerts from NPR's All Songs Considered features your favorite musicians performing at Bob Boilen's desk in the NPR Music office. This is the AUDIO only archive.Are you a fancy A/V nerd and need video? Visit our new Tiny Desk Concert video channel. Eye-popping video and all of the music you've come to expect.

King Creosote And Jon Hopkins: Tiny Desk Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published September 4, 2011 at 6:00 AM MDT

At the risk of serving up a spoiler three months in advance, King Creosote and Jon Hopkins' Diamond Mine is going to turn up near the top of many Best Albums of 2011 lists on this website. The breathless love isn't unanimous across the NPR Music staff, but it's widespread and intense, and rightfully so. For all its brevity — just seven songs in 32 minutes — Diamond Mine is an absolutely spectacular record, as plainspoken and charming as it is breathtaking in its cinematic sweep.

It's also got some mystery going for it — Scottish singer King Creosote, a.k.a. Kenny Anderson, is prolific but little-known in the U.S., while English producer and multi-instrumentalist Jon Hopkins is better known for his room-filling electronic works — as further evidenced by packaging that never shows either of their faces. So watching these two unassuming, modestly dressed guys re-create Diamond Mine's beauty from just a few feet away can be jarring, especially to those who've spun the record, say, dozens of times in recent months.

To immerse yourself in Diamond Mine is to be transported to a small, calm town in the Scottish countryside: For all of Anderson's reflective ruminations on aging and regret, he and Hopkins know how to make listeners feel at peace; to make the faraway seem everyday. Standing in the NPR Music offices, they somehow lose little of their mystique. Once they've led listeners through two of Diamond Mine's highlights — "John Taylor's Month Away" and "Bubble" — it's easy to follow them wherever they're going next. (On the night of this performance, a bunch of us from NPR Music road-tripped to a coffee shop in Vienna, Va., just to hear them perform these songs again.) That they follow the Diamond Mine songs with two more of Anderson's divine compositions is just a bonus.

Set List

  • "John Taylor's Month Away"

  • "Bubble"

  • "Cockle Shell"

  • "And The Racket They Made"

    • Credits

    Tucker Walsh, Michael Katzif (cameras); edited by Michael Katzif; audio by Kevin Wait; photo by Emily Bogle

    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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    Tiny Desk ConcertsWeekend Edition SundayWeekend Edition Sunday
    Stephen Thompson
    Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)
    See stories by Stephen Thompson