Tag: Jon Hopkins

Listened Jon Hopkins raves on from Double J

The UK producer and pianist talks to Dylan Lewis about his massive Australian rave dates.

Dylan Lewis speaks with Jon Hopkins. They discuss Hopkins’ cross-over between classical and electronic music. Asked about this, Hopkins suggests that his particular interest in electronic music is the ability to layer sounds. Although he has worked with many artists, Hopkins says that the one artist he would like to work with is Thom Yorke. Lewis also talks about meditation and his wish to listen to Hopkins’ music when they open the first hotel in space.
Listened Episode 136: Jon Hopkins from Song Exploder

Jon Hopkins is an electronic music producer whose been nominated twice for the UK’s Mercury Prize. Along with his frequent collaborator, Brian Eno, he co-produced Coldplay‘s Grammy-award winning album, Viva la Vida. In May 2018, Jon Hopkins released his fifth album, Singularity. It was named Best New Music by Pitchfork. In this episode, Jon Hopkins takes apart the song “Luminous Beings,” which was inspired in part by the meditative and therapeutic effects of psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms. Jon talks about his own experience with drug, and how it shaped this song. He also details the less magical moments where he hated the music was he making, and had to destroy it as part of the creative process.

Jon Hopkins reflects upon the dangers of the first ideas and building something to destroy it:

There’s a smoothness and a simplicity to that early sketch which is nothing something I am looking for  … nothing I ever do in the early stages ever makes it to the end … the first things you do are only there to caputre some kind of spark or some kind of spirit … you take a few days away and feel you want to be sick.

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So the whole result of that week of sketching those first ideas has result in one sound which will be the seed which I am going to plant … Basically I built something in order so I can destroy it and then something more interestingly can grow out of it.