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Jon Jenkins — Flow - Remastered
(Spotted Peccary SPM-0404, 1998/2025, CD / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-10-31

Flow - Remastered Cover art

A couple years before the turn of the century, Jon Jenkins’ Flow was released. It was in fact Jenkins’ first solo album on Spotted Peccary, although he had appeared on other albums on the label prior to that, most notably Deborah Martin’s Under the Moon and his collaboration with Paul Lackey, Continuum. We reviewed that original version of Flow back in our printed issue #17, but that was way back then. Now, some 27 years after its original release, it has found new life in a brilliant new remastered edition that sounds superb enough to make a listener forget all about the original. Synth based, Jenkins composed, performed, and produced all of the music on the eleven tracks herein, with a little help from Jeff Pearce (ambient electric guitar on three of the tracks), David Helpling and Howard Givens (ambient guitar on one track each), though it’s Givens who did the excellent job of remastering this, and Daniel Pipitone creating the new and much improved cover art and package design. The set opens with the deep percussives and droning of “From the Spring,” with swirling waves in the background and some subtle sequences just under the surface, while powerful synth chords fade in and out and light up the sky until it all just stops abruptly, where “Into a World of Wonder” takes over with gentle keyboard melodies flying gracefully over a churning bottom end. I’m hearing a lot of detail here that I completely missed on the original Flow — the remastering brings it right out into the open. The title track proceeds very quietly at times, though in those quiet spaces so much more detail can now be heard. Other standout tracks include “Breathing in the Deep,” a floating ambient piece much deserving of that title, as it breathes much like ocean currents, one of the three tracks featuring Jeff Pearce’s ambient guitar, and “The Power / Washed Away,” the opening section featuring a most interesting percussive cadence dotted with brisk electronic sequences and flowing textures, while the latter section slows down considerably with the sequences being more evident amid the floating bliss. “Night Drifting Through Black Canyon” makes superb use of guitar, almost sounding like human voices bending and twisting amid a beautiful cloud of ambient shimmer, while the three-part “Part of the Solution” drifts into the listeners perception slowly but deliberately, like a shower of starlight as it proceeds along its way to a near seventeen minute conclusion. If you’ve never heard Flow before, it’s never sounded better than it does now.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases, 1998 recordings

Related artist(s): David Helpling, Jon Jenkins, Jeff Pearce, Howard Givens

More info
http://thejonjenkins.bandcamp.com/album/flow-remastered

 

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