Hear Jon Hopkins new track Singing Bowl (Ascension), the first in a new meditative series – NME

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.

Jon Hopkins. Credit: Getty

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 producers painstaking hypnotic mastery.

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Hear Jon Hopkins new track Singing Bowl (Ascension), the first in a new meditative series - NME