Jon Hopkins
About
Jonathan Julian Hopkins (born 15 August 1979) is an English musician and producer who writes and performs electronic music. He began his career playing keyboard for Imogen Heap, and has produced or contributed to albums by Brian Eno, Coldplay, David Holmes and others. In 2017, Pitchfork placed his album Immunity at number 37 on its list of "The 50 Best IDM Albums of All Time". Track listing. His fifth studio album Singularity went on to receive a Grammy nomination for Best Dance/Electronic Album in December 2018.
His music can be described as a wasteland of synthesizers overhung by evaporated strings and guitar that merge into a remarkably complete sonic landscape, forming a universe that pulses with deep consciousness and a sense of endless discovery. Ambient that builds into a crescendo, layers of synths only made better by hard hitting percussion and elements of glitch.
The album Immunity promoted him to noted techno auteur. Like that breakthrough, Singularity is a beat-music odyssey pitched between acid house and introspective ambient bliss, constant change and eternal return, sublunary and sublime. It also combines many other opposites into thrillingly unstable wholes. The producer’s distinctive techno is coarse and granular, as if electricity were a solid you could grind in a mill, yet it flows in a graceful stream. It squelches like muck and shines like crystal. It beats like a body, but it moves like a mind.
According to a 2013 Guardian interview, he believes that electronic music is the sound of human ingenuity and he is taking steps to keep the personality in digital music, rather than someone choosing from a dropdown menu of sounds. He sources his sounds from unique sources from the world around him and takes great care into the feeling that the song provides. He has been learning autogenic training, which is a relaxation technique in the realm of hypnosis. Hopkins describes the motivation behind his music: “It’s great to do something that makes your brain just switch to a different mode, and music can do that really powerfully.”
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