Jon Hopkins has launched a new ‘Meditations’ series and shared its first track – listen to ‘Singing Bowl (Ascension)’ below.
The track was created using vibrations from a 100-year-old singing bowl that Hopkins found in an antique shop in Delhi.
The first version of what became the new track was heard at a 2019 installation at the Helsinki Arts Festival. Listen to the new track below.
Talking about creativity during the coronavirus pandemic, and the process of creating the new track, Hopkins 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.
“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.”
He added: “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.”
‘Singing Bowl (Ascension)’ appears on a new meditative 24-hour playlist that Hopkins curated for Spotify, which you can listen to here.
Jon Hopkins last shared new music back in February with stripped-back, acoustic track ‘Scene Suspended’. It follows 2018 LP ‘Singularity’, which NME described as perfectly showcasing the producer’s “painstaking hypnotic mastery”.
