Jon Hopkins interview on his process for the new ambient album

Found a lot of gems in here, about his process, his dislike of mixing, and seeing himself as curating sounds as they happen, rather than upfront sound design that attempts to capture what you hear in your head. Found it kind of liberating to read. The album is great too, imo.

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I am a simple man, I see a J. Hopkins article I click like!

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I like his music but the marketing bullS#$t around his latest album has put me off.

I’ll have a read. I saw him live at berghain years ago and it was good.

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You don’t like drug-infused journeys into the Ecuadorean jungle while listening to American acid gurus?! huh. :wink:

Thanks for sharing this article, OP - it’s interesting to see how he works, and, for someone who’s work is always on the highly polished side I’m interested to see how much exploration and accident play a part in what he does.

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I’m a total sucker for new age mystical nonsense, and I do think he’s being sincere in the experiences that led to his music (and there’s maybe something to be said about how a lot of modern art production is quite stubbornly materialist and anti-romantic/spiritual. Imo regardless of the reality of any of it, music gets more fun when musicians get into in weird shit :sweat_smile:), but I definitely get what you’re saying and I don’t think for a second that his ‘process’ would be getting this kind of attention if the marketing bods hadn’t seen the opportunities for riding the current new age/ambient/psychedelics wave.

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Really like what he does, and am modestly into psychedelia and brain exploration too, but his last album was named Singularity and the cover was a star constellation shaped like a DMT molecule.

I think he went a bit overboard when he did that.

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It’s a perfectly good album and it’s always good to read about artists and their creative process.

I do think it’s being marketed a bit too heavily on the therapeutic angle, but whatever, that’s marketing, isn’t it.

There’s a line when artists become successful and want to do crazy shit between making something genuinely interesting that you wouldn’t have been able to make previously and self-indulgent ego trips. I feel like this album is very much still in the former category, it feels like an artist using his increasing resources and connections to make music that is interesting, engaging and authentic, even if all the new age shit kinda takes the sheen off it a bit for me. But he’s not doing it for me, so that’s fine.

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I discovered Hopkins in 2004. Since then, his music has changed a lot from light pop chill-out to hard glitch experiments and then completely turned into ambient meditation. I love how this artist explores himself, and this is perhaps one of the few who manage to change their style with changing introspection.

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I’m looking forward to listening to this album as I like Jon Hopkins rather a lot, but this new-age mysticism stuff always makes me eye roll a bit when I read about it!

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His Late Night Tales is really good I think. I then learned he produced a record of Coldplay, which I cannot resolve personally lol (sorry for any Coldplay fans here - you do you:)

Will have a read.

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Why?

I’m not who wrote that, but in general I do agree, I like music more when it’s about the music, instead of the story/image around it. But I’m sure there’s many counter arguments valid :slight_smile:

So did Brian Eno btw :wink:

Lol omg

I liked his album Singularity quite a lot. Never looked at the album cover close enough to see that DMT molecule / at least I have forgotten that fact.

I watched a bit from the Aubrey Marcus’ interview

To be honest … I really don’t care how somebody got to his creative ideas/workflows …I won’t hang speakers in trees because I read that someone did that.

Watched his Ram Dass Be Here Now inspired / cloned video this morning:

I liked it. Well done.

Find your own fire and try to keep it alive. I think it’s great that we have famous artists propagate / do PR for psychotherapy with psychedelics. This is the only way we will get this legalized/accessable all around the world.

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I don’t know, not to my taste, it felt a little bit dorky to me.

Wow you’re taking this at heart! We’re just expressing opinions pretty mildly you know, nothing against you.

And I agree with both statement.

Dreams, babies, and DMT trips: meaningful, important, potentially life changing for you. Deadly dull for everyone else.

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:joy:

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Reminds me of some of the tracks using Alan Watts.

It is therapeutic and if it reaches more people thats a good thing.

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Haha, I didn‘t actually mean it like that … I just think he did everything right … he got our attention and probably earns a substantial amount of money with stuff he likes and probably helps one or the other person with his „therapeutic music“. So that‘s a good thing for science/laws/personal development.

Listened to Dr David Nutt podcast yesterday about this topic. So my point is: Everybody who is doing research or contributes in one way or the other in this field has my personal blessing :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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