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Jon Hopkins: ‘Psychedelic experiences inspired this album’

The musician on film scores, technological developments and the natural highs behind his new album, Singularity

Born in Kingston upon Thames in 1979, the musician and producer Jon Hopkins studied piano at the Royal College of Music before turning his hand to electronic music. He has released four studio albums, including the 2013 critical smash Immunity, and has collaborated with artists as diverse as Brian Eno, King Creosote and Coldplay. Hopkins’s mind-bending fifth album, Singularity, is out this Friday on Domino. He plays London’s Village Underground on 10 May.

You said on Instagram recently that you knew you’d make this record 15 years ago but only figured out how to make it in the past couple of years. What twigged?
I knew a few things in advance, including the title and the idea of the album starting and ending with a really simple tone. I also wanted there to be a symbiotic relationship between all the sounds, so that everything would seem to grow out of everything else. But I was still figuring things out back then – if I was a visual artist, you would say I was still learning how to draw – so I needed to get the basics right before trying to be conceptual and ambitious.

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