Jon Hopkins releases 20 minute track made for meditation

Jon Hopkins has recently shared a new release, “Singing Bowl (Ascension)”, the first in a new series of ‘Meditations’ which is available to stream now. To create this piece, Hopkins recorded a range of vibrations created by a 100 year-old singing bowl found in an antique shop in Delhi. He then fed these into a laptop running a simple, generative system that triggered the hits and drones at random. This would allow synchronicity to play a central part in the composition process, and remove as much ‘thinking’ as possible from the writing. An earlier version of this generative piece was used as a sound installation at last year’s Helsinki Arts Festival.

When talking about his decision to create the new release he said “Like so many people I felt pretty paralysed by this situation when it first unfolded. All my plans for the year were cancelled, and everything felt so weird and dreamlike. But gradually I found I wanted to create something - to find peace and perspective through making music, as I have always done.

Hopkins talked very fondly of the process of making the piece, stating "It felt beautifully pure to just use one acoustic sound source, and no synths. It was liberating to write something without playing anything on a keyboard - to avoid the familiar diatonic scale for the first time, and thus avoid any of my own conditioned playing habits. There was a magic in setting this generative system in motion then just letting the vibrations of this bowl create their own world. I listened to harmonics layering on top of harmonics for hours and was transported.”