Jon Hopkins has shared a new release – Singing Bowl (Ascension) from a new series of ‘Meditations’ which is available to stream now. The piece3 is part of a specially curated 24-hour long playlist for Spotify, designed with deep meditation experiences in mind, the piece perfectly fits into Jon’s transcendent selections.
He created the piece by recording vibrations from a 100 year old singing bowl found in an antique shop in Delhi. Fed into a laptop, a simple system triggered the hits and drones at random, allowing synchronicity to play a big part on the process, and remove as much thinking from it as possible.
On creating the piece 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. 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.”
Over the course of the whole 21 minutes of the piece, it’s quiet ambience pulls you gently by the hand along with it, the rings and bells bleeding into each other, making their own way as the piece gradually grows and expands.
Check it out, here
