I’ve always been a strong advocate for simplicity in music. You don’t need 15 million layers of production, you don’t need the perfect sound, the perfect combination of melody and rhythm and instrumentation. Actually, there isn’t any rule to what you need at all, as long as it gives you all the feels. And that’s the magic of it, isn’t it? Striving for perfection seems so counterproductive when it comes to the magic.
And then there are artists like Jon Hopkins. The works of the British electronic producer and artist (spanning numerous studio albums since 2001 and some additional soundtrack work) can be most easily summed up as „mesmerizing“. And it’s especially the richness and the diversity that makes it so. From exploring the depth and darkness of the dancefloor, to the bittersweet, fleeting beauty of organic piano chords, to the hypnotic, musical exploration of transcendental meditation, there are worlds to explore within the sonic landscape of Jon Hopkins, and they feel endless and just incredibly wholesome.
His latest release, the 41-minutes-long, continuous work „Ritual“, can hardly be named an album. It works a little like an esoteric piece for meditation, but the way it is crafted means it goes way beyond that. On this sunny morning, sitting in a Berlin backyard garden, surrounded by lush, green trees, Jon tells me that the piece actually comprises 440 layers of production. That sounds like an insane number to someone like me, who is more drawn to imperfection. But then, „Ritual“ is just… perfect.
I’ve also never had a thing, or even a good ear, for the quality of sound systems. When it’s music that I absolutely love, I can be totally vibing to it on a shitty car radio. But the day after our conversation, I am invited to a listening session of „Ritual“ at the Reethaus in Berlin, a room with a 360 degree, 16 channel sound system and a pyramid roof. What happens to you when you listen to „Ritual“ in that kind of setting, especially together with other people, can only be described as transcendental. I was convinced I was going to lie down at some point, but I kept sitting upright, because the crown of my head felt wide open and I didn’t want so spill any of the beautiful sounds entering through it. I would go as far as to say I felt like I heard all 440 layers, and I wouldn’t want to miss any of them.
It takes one to know one, so I felt as though meeting Jon might open the door to a more in-depth conversation on the connection between music and your own „spiritual evolution“, as Jon calls it, even though „it sounds ridiculous, and being English you have to apologise for saying things like that.“ No, we don’t apologise.
Joining our conversation is Jon’s friend and creative partner Dan Kijowski, who goes by the artist name 7RAYS, runs an off-grid solar-powered studio and smallholding farm deep in the woods in Devon, on the South-West coast of England. According to his bio, he is also a highly accomplished canoeist. The two have known each other since they were 11 years old, and at one point, when we talk about the final section of „Ritual“, Dan says that he started crying once, when Jon played it to him on the piano. We drink tea. We share photos of cats. It’s one of these conversations where you just want to sink into each other’s arms and start weeping „Isn’t life beautiful?“ Nothing better than being reminded of that.
I remember the first time I read „Jon Hopkins made a symphony“ and thinking, “ Oh yeah, my life is complete now”!
Jon Hopkins: (laughs) I mean, it isn’t a symphony. There was an early version of a press release where I used the word symphony, but actually it’s a mistake, it wasn’t supposed to come out.
Oh really? Great, that’s the one I read, obviously!
Jon: (laughs) But it’s an interesting point. Because basically, when you release an album, you have to figure out how to describe it in words. And I don’t find it easy to describe music in words, because everything there is to say about the music is said by the sound. But unfortunately we don’t live in a world where that’s enough. And if you want to talk about it, and you want people to listen to it and be interested, you have to work out a way. So I started working with the word symphony. Maybe it’s a symphony, because it’s the length of a symphony. But it doesn’t have anything else in common with a symphony. It doesn’t have three movements, it’s not classical, it doesn’t have acoustic instruments. So we ended up changing the word to “ceremonial piece”, which is what I now think of it as. It’s a 41-minute ceremonial piece, meaning kind of whatever you want that to mean. But it’s clearly to guide some kind of ceremony. Some sort of personal thing. It’s much more about the internal world. It doesn’t have anything in common with classical music, but there’s maybe… In terms of encouraging people to listen to longer form music, that’s what I wanted to do really. And that’s what it does have in common with a symphony. Like, why does the arbitrary number of three to four minutes have to be the only format in which we consume music? There’s such a war against attention spans going on through tech. Ultimately we go so far in one direction that there will be some people that want the opposite. That’s me! And I’m hoping there’ll be other people out there who also want that. And then maybe you can get into a world where the importance of music is restored beyond three-minute distractions, into something that can guide you a little deeper. That’s the intention anyway.
I cannot tell you how intrigued I was, when I first saw that it is one whole 41-minute long piece. I absolutely celebrate that.
Jon: Oh, thank you. We need people like you (laughs).
Not trying to sound like a saint, but I am also trying to teach that to my kids.
Jon: Oh no, no, that’s great! We need to do that. Like I said, this is a new thing. Everything being extremely short is a new concept. Things used to last some period of time, and attention, focus and presence were not fought against. This is the most distracted time in history. Whereas we actually need to be more focused than ever, more present than ever. I actually really like short pop songs, when they are brilliantly written. That is the correct length for certain pieces. But if you’re doing instrumental… the question is, how do you plug something that is not really within the modern listening habit into this modern world? So I made these short versions of two of the sections. But what you heard in that first snippet is not a cut from the middle of the album.
It’s condensed.
Jon: Exactly. That’s really interesting to see, when you retrospectively rework music. How do we fit fifteen minutes of activity into five minutes? You realise that there’s so much time dilation, the illusion of time passing in a different speed, when you listen to longer forms. That’s another thing that is really exciting about it. Things happen quite slowly and rarely in some sections of the piece. Time is an illusion anyway. Time is completely elastic, based on the experience you’re having and how present you are.
Dan Kijowski: What is really interesting is that music is an art form that exists within that time access. If you’re ever looking at a painting, it’s obviously kind of static, whereas music is evolving through time. Therefore time is a really important part of music in general. A piece could be ten seconds, or it could be three minutes, or it could be forty minutes or seven hours.
Jon: It’s almost an instrument. We were looking at time almost like the canvas that you’re painting on. Once you stretch out and once you allow it to be the length it wants to be, it’s an enormous kind of freedom. And then there’s all these different conversational challenges that come with that. We were discussing a lot when we were making it. I would send sections to Dan and he would listen. He was very strong on making sure that each section had a purpose. It’s hard to describe, because it’s sonic, what these lead sounds are, but each section throughout the 41 minutes has a focus. There’s one bit that is all about a chant, there’s one bit that is all about the drums, there’s one bit that is all about the slightly techno-y sound that comes in. And each has to have its moment to shine.
Dan: But always changing. We had this idea that it was like a river. The river is kind of flowing and as you move down the river, you always see different things, and different things come into view. It’s not ever only one thing. I guess it’s like nature: it’s always changing into something else from something else.
Jon: Nothing’s static. And that was such an enjoyable process, once you embrace it. It’s a classic example of surrendering any predicted outcome. Because you know that a 41- minute piece cannot be as big as a „Singularity“ type album that I did six years ago. So you just forget entirely about the commercial side. And you just let it fit into what it fits into. That’s why I enjoyed making it so much more than any record I made before, because I had no pressure. I felt zero pressure from anyone. Mostly myself: it’s me that put pressure on myself in the past. And I just dropped all that. It’s more like uncovering something than creating something. You’ve been given all these pieces of a puzzle and you have to figure out where they go together. Except that puzzles are tedious and this wasn’t (laughs).
That is so interesting. Because once you’ve heard the whole thing, you cannot go back to these condensed excerpts. You sense that it’s not the way it’s supposed to be.
Jon: Well, exactly. The thought was, you wouldn’t watch a whole film and then watch the trailer at the end. So it’s closer to a film than an album. That’s why these listening events we’ve been having, you can have multiple, you can have three in a row and it’s not about me being there. I’m often not there, any more than a film director would be there at the screening of a film. That is the version. There isn’t a better version that gets played live. There is this version, in surround, so it’s not the same as how you might listen to it at home. And you’re listening with people. I mean, obviously there’s been many sound installations, but it’s combining things in an interesting way. It’s certainly new for me. It’s a ritual. The name is very much factual. And that’s quite a neutral word, it’s very much up to you to find out what it is.
Again, not trying to sound like a saint, but I actually made it my ritual over the past few weeks to listen to it once a day as a whole.
Dan: How do you feel afterwards?
Amazing! It works so well as a ritual. There are so many things you can discover with each listen. It sounds different every time.
Jon: It does. And that’s an interesting thing. That was the same with the last album. I think that’s partly because of the time dilation thing. But also because you have strongly hypnotic elements in music like drones, repeating rhythms or gradually evolving things. And also there’s 440 layers to the album. Your ear will be drawn to different things, and because there is the hypnotic component, your brain state will change. If you’re using it as a meditation, then that means that is working to some degree. If your brain state changes, your attention will be guided to different areas, depending on maybe what you need that day. That’s what I like to think anyway (laughs).
Dan: It kind of feels as well as the music shifts through the more intense sections, that it somehow breaks something down inside you. And the calm section at the end is very emotional and very heart centered. Whenever I listen to it, I always come away with this very sense of my heart is being adjusted somehow. You don’t come away thinking: „Oh, that was really crazy.“ You come away feeling quite calm and centered.
Jon: It’s interesting to me, because I always loved the album format, the longer form of music. I mean, with my first album I was only 19, but all the other ones were quite strongly narrativised throughout. It always seemed to me so sad that with so many albums, the last track is just another track. And it’s the ending! What you leave people with! And now we live in an era where people don’t listen to full works that often. But it doesn’t matter, because you can’t get hung up on what other people will listen to. There is something so precious about the last ten minutes of an album. So this one really, really embraces that. There’s a very empty space for a bit, a void. And then the strings come in. There’s actually the sound of wind blowing through tree leaves. You can hear it quite strongly.
And there’s a cat purring at the end, right?
Jon: It’s a cat, yes (laughs). The very last five minutes is about grounding again. Re-centering you, so that you can then go back to normal life, because you’ve been taken up here and exploded. And you need to come down. The two things that I used for that are the piano, which is recorded very intimately, so you can hear the mechanics of the piano. And then the cat, which is one of my best friends’ cats, who just has the loudest purr. It’s in California, this cat. I brought my field recorder to record all this machinery that I was expected to hear at this installation that I went to. The reason I thought I was bringing it there had nothing to do with what I was really supposed to be recording, which was actually just this cat. As soon as I heard him purr I was just like „wait a minute…“ And then you can hear me stroking him and you can hear me walking away. Just to leave people with a completely organic sound. It is also recorded in a room in a house, which is where you might be listening to it.
Dan: The music is a journey that goes through quite distinct spaces. But the cat comes back to your home and your heart and your family. Things that are really important.
Jon: Yeah, the simplicity of things like that.
And again, no joke, one of our cats always comes to lie down on me when I listen to it.
Jon: Oh really? I love that.
I sit down or I lie down to listen to it, and I can rely on having a cat to pet for the last ten minutes of it.
Jon: That’s so nice. Cats started appearing in my life more and more recently. I think cats have understandings that we don’t. They have a lot of strange senses that we don’t. My friend Cherif (Haszizume) who’s the key mix engineer on the album with me, is very into his cats. He likes to read about the mythology behind cats and the history of humans with cats, why we have these relationships with them. And he told me that the cat was often seen as the bridge between the cosmic realm and the earth-bound realm. So maybe the purring at the end is the bridge, taking you back to this reality. But also the thing with purring itself, on a physiological level… if a cat purrs, it’s creating a vibration, that apparently aids its own health and calm. But also it’s proven to do the same for humans. So when you hear that sound, you know it makes you feel good, but also measurably, it does actually make you feel good. Your brain waves, your breathing apparently, will change. It’s a therapeutic device that is physically built into a cat. How amazing is that!