Near-legendary English electronic musician and producer Jon Hopkins is back with his new album RITUAL. Designed as a singular 41-minute moving piece, he is here to tell us about the story behind it.
It’s nice to meet you.
And you. How are you today?
I’m alright. It’a hot summer day in Istanbul. How about in London? Is it hot there, too?
No, it’s not. It’s kind of gray, and I quite like it, to be honest. (laughs)
The usual London then.
Typical London vibes, yeah. We get a few days of sun. I was in Istanbul recently. Very nice place.
Do you have specific fun memories from here you can share?
Yeah. There was a festival I played at last year. That was great fun. We had a very nice time. We went to a restaurant called Adana, and it specialized in Adana kebab. It was one of the best meals I’ve ever had. It was a very casual place, but the quality of the lamb was just one of the best I’ve ever had in my life. We really enjoyed the area, walking around, it felt quite young and very safe.
I’ve never spent longer than a couple of days in Turkey for work, because if I have a crew with me, you have to be in and out quite quickly. So it’d be nice to have a bit more time there one day.
I missed your last show because I had another thing going on. I would like to witness that live one day.
Cool.
For you, music is a spiritual journey. And part of our spirituality is connected to our subconscious, so let me ask this: Do you have an active dream life?
Yeah, I do, because I sleep quite lightly, and I feel like I dream very large amount. But my dreams are actually not that fascinating. (laughs) They feature people. I know they’re quite mundane and in some ways, and quite funny sometimes. As for memory, you know how it is, they kind of fade very quickly, and I never really write them down, but I feel that my waking hours and my meditations in particular are where my subconscious comes out more, if that makes sense.
Do you have a specific last dream that you remember?
I mean, it’s not really something that I could explain. No. Nothing’s coming to mind. Dream life has never been a huge part of my awareness. Even though I have a lot of them, they’re very rarely that present.
I did have one. This is not the last one I can remember, but it was a dream that I experienced a few months after a relationship ending, where I felt like I had the opportunity to talk to this person who I hadn’t spoken to for a few months after the breakup. It was a very healing and profound experience. We said the things to each other in our dreams that we hadn’t said in real life. That’s the sort of dream I would be interested in getting regularly. They normally just include boring things about logistics or something. (laughs) Quite often if you have shows, you have dreams about the shows going wrong or the equipment not being there or not knowing the music as you go on stage. These are all very typical show and tech anxiety dreams, which I don’t think are important. But that one with the ex girlfriend was very beautiful and healing. So there is that sometimes, but it’s very, very rare.
I’m glad that it was healing for you. Obviously, the main reason we are here today is that you have a new album coming out, called RITUAL, and from the press releases, I know that this is a counterpart to the last album, Music for Psychedelic Therapy. Can you dwell on that? How does it connect to the last album, and what is the story of this album in general?
It’s a kinetic counterpart. I feel like the previous album is quite static in the way that it doesn’t have the rhythm and it doesn’t inspire bodily movement, really. Whereas this one is all about that. This one is all about primal energy, animal energy, feeling your body. I think particularly in the middle section, as it reaches its climax, it really has a lot of energy coursing through it, which I hope people will feel and will do something in them, shift something for them. It was an amazing experience making it, very enjoyable. I think it combines with physical techniques like breath work more than it does with meditation and psychedelics, which the previous one was aligned to, but I feel like they’re coming from the same realm. In a similar way, I think they both felt like they composed themselves, and that’s how I feel it should be. That’s when the subconscious is doing the work instead of the mind, and that’s how I like it to be, ideally.
Would you say that psychedelics again took some role in you making this?
It’s difficult to separate anything out at this point, because I don’t really use anything anymore very often. Just a few times a year, maybe, but once you’ve had those experiences and embodied them, they tend to come out in the music forever. So they’re definitely in there, but I can’t identify exactly which ones and in what way they’ve affected things. I think there’s a message that I’ve received over the years through these medicines, and it can’t be stopped now, it’s coming out. (laughs)
For me, when I’m writing down ideas, many of them actually tend to slip out of my head very easily. That’s really annoying. Throughout the years of your music making, have you found consistent methods to actually hold on to those ideas more profoundly?
It’s interesting. I think sometimes I get ideas that appear in the middle of the night or when I’m out and around. Sometimes if it’s a rhythm that I hear somewhere, I can get my phone out and record, and then I can transcribe that rhythm later. But what I’ve really found is that almost everything I do begins in the studio where I am right now, and I will sit here and I’ll play something, and then that will be followed by a second part that will suggest itself to me. I’ll know what to do when I’ve heard the first part. So it is, in a way, just a case of putting yourself in the creative room and being open to it, closing the door to the world and being open to things starting to flow. That’s been working for me.
There is an anonymous quote about art that I really love: “Art is never finished, but merely abandoned.” Through your music making does the decision to finish -or abandon- a track come to you easily?
I’ve always found it’s interesting that there have been various blocks that I come up against in music making, but I’ve never had that particular one. And I know a lot of musicians who have. I feel very lucky. I always know when it’s finished, because my trick has always just been, ‘Don’t listen to it for a couple of weeks.’ Because if you try and get something all the way to the finish line directly from the middle of writing it, you won’t be able to hear beyond all the work you’ve just done, all the very small details that you’ve just improved or any of that kind of thing. Whereas if you don’t listen for two weeks, and then you hear it again, it will appear just right. And be very strict about it would be my advice. Don’t listen to it even once. Then you listen to it first time, maybe with someone else in the room, and you will find a list of five to ten small notes to address. You address those and it’s done. Really, the ideal is to listen to it from start to finish and to have no thoughts occur to you at all about what could be better. That’s my technique, and that’s always worked for me.
I love that you have a firm grasp of a track being finished.
It’s very helpful.
Let’s talk more on the technical side of things. What equipment did you actually use on the making process of RITUAL?
Ableton is the core of everything. And then over here, you see the Moog One here. This is the main synth on the first half of the album. There’s an MS-20 and ARP2600, and a Korg Trinity. My collaborators use different synths as well. There’s a lot of different analog synths on this record. I mean, really a lot. And there’s no software synth at all. I don’t have a strict policy. I’ve just never found a software synth that I’ve resonated with. They don’t feel like they’re really there.
This record was all about trying to capture that primal, earthbound energy. I felt it was important to have circuitry, really, and particularly that vintage sound. There’s no samplers on my end. But again, some of the collaborators do have other things. Matt Hillier, who’s on the record as Ishq, has been collecting samples for many years, and was sending things my way. So there’s some samples there, but they’re not coming from me.
What else? I think that’s kind of it, really. I mean, Ableton is the star here. Because the album is one long piece of music. I think maybe for the first time this year, Mac Pro computers were powerful enough to run an entire album with all the plugins live, all at the same time. There were 440 audio tracks in this album, and everything had all these plugins on. The whole album was loaded in one session, which is really amazing. I was able to work in a different way from any other album, where I was able to always have the whole piece in my head at any one time. That’s quite remarkable, really. It means you could be working on a section around twelve minutes, and then suddenly say, “I want to go and change this thing!” at 35 minutes, and then the ideas will cross pollinate. That’s how you get a very unified piece of music, I think, from start to finish.
Thanks for the detailed answer. Here is another one from a friend of mine: During the recording sessions of Immunity, did you use a single MS-20, or were there a second or third you did parallel recordings with?
No, just one. I suppose they’re layered up a little bit. I mean, if you take “Open Eye Signal”, the first single from the album, as an example, the MS-20 is forefront, but just using two oscillators at once. And then there was a layer of drone MS-20 multitrack behind it. I’m very much about layering and sequencing sounds. That’s how I like to work. So I don’t tend to get everything running in the studio at the same time. I tend to capture audio and then layer it up.
Can you name, at the top of your head, one project you would like to collaborate with someday?
Well, I’d like to do some stuff with Jonsi from Sigur Ros. We did actually do a session together six years ago, but nothing came out of it, mostly because of the scheduling at the time, but I’d like to work with him again because he was amazing and they were one of my favorite bands growing up in my twenties.
When you check your streaming platform’s history, what are the last three things you streamed?
Okay, hang on. Quite an eclectic mix here. There is “Seri Fu Sidi” by Vieux Drop. Then “Von Dutch” by Charli XCX. It’s the coolest, isn’t it? I love that song. I was listening to some 1960s folk as well with “Mole in the Ground” by Karen Dalton.
That is all of my questions for you Jon, thanks for joining in. If you have something to add, please do.
I think we covered most of it. We’d like to invite people to listen to the album as one piece of music. I know I always say this, but even though it will appear on streaming in eight parts, it will play as one part, and it really is designed to be listened to in 41 minutes. So I’d like to invite the audience to, if they are open to it, giving it their attention for that period of time, and try a deep listening experience. If you can get to one of the in-person ones that we’re doing around the world, then please do. And if you can’t, then I recommend good speakers, maybe with friends or even good headphones on your own. You know, there’s various ways, but key is not to have your phone with you, just to listen. And maybe light a candle, have your eyes closed, make a ritual of it, you know? That would be my invitation.
You can check out Jon Hopkins’ Bandcamp page here.
