One of the outright titans of modern electronic music, Jon Hopkins has transcended those limiting labels of ‘IDM’ and ‘electronica’ with records such as 2013’s Immunity and 2018’s Singularity breaking through his unique, emotive work into the ears and minds of a huge array of listeners. If he was said to have a watchword, 'humanity' would be it.
We were fascinated then, when rifling through our old archive of vintage Computer Music magazines, to uncover an interview we did with Jon from way back in 2009.
At that point, Hopkins had just finished working with Coldplay on their massive Viva La Vida album (which interpolated Hopkins’ track Light Through the Veins for its opening and closing track).
Jon was keen to tell us in detail about his then relatively humble production set-up. At that time, it orbited Magix’ Sound Forge.
Perhaps most fascinating are the questions that round out the interview, asking Hopkins what he wants to do next. “[To] make stranger things, to go more deviant musically,” Hopkins foreshadowed. “The whole electronic music thing is great now, but I want to avoid the immediate trends, so there will be no trace of the 80s! I listen to it and love it, but I don’t want to follow anything.”
It seems Jon certainly kept that philosophy in mind when making his 2010s masterpieces.
Below is the full, unedited interview.
Jon Hopkins - The Computer Music Interview (2009)
Jon Hopkins - The Computer Music Interview (2009)
Armed with an old laptop and ancient software, Jon Hopkins has climbed the ranks to become one of the hottest young producers on the block
Jon Hopkins has seemingly done far more using far less than anyone we’ve ever interviewed. His solo material is captivating electronica that veers between simple, mesmerising piano pieces and atmospheric ambience with brutal rhythms. However, you’re more likely to know him from his collaborations with Brian Eno, or, most probably, his work with Coldplay. The opening and closing track on the latter’s Viva La Vida, is actually a version of a Hopkins track called Light Through The Veins,
So, if you’re anything like us, you’d expect this hot, young wiz to have a hot, young computer packed to the rafters with hot, young plug-ins, right? Wrong. When Hopkins goes to work, he takes along a six-year-old PC laptop loaded with old versions of Cubase and Sound Forge. But how does he get away with it, where does Eno fit in, and how did he end up getting a track on an album by one of the biggest bands in the world – twice?!
We’ll get down to finding answers to all these questions in a moment, but first here’s some essential background info. While growing up, Jon was always into making music, at first with a Tascam Portastudio - “an enormous brown thing” - and later an Amiga 500 and OctaMED.
“You could do loads of stuff with samples, and it had MIDI!” enthuses Jon. “It tended to slow down if you had a lot of notes going on, but that was a price you had to pay!”
Later on, while studying at London’s Royal College of Music, Jon discovered the power of MOTU’s Digital Performer, but eventually settled on Cubase as his sequencer of choice. “1998 was the first time I could afford a PC with enough power to run whatever version of Cubase was around,” he recalls. “I had a SoundBlaster soundcard on which I made my first and second albums. In fact, I only updated from that because it broke – I think it caught fire one day!”
It seems that Hopkins only upgrades when he needs to, yet he’s made some of the most extraordinary music with very basic setups".
“The second album, Contact Note, was all audio,” says Jon, “so everything would go in through the SoundBlaster for fiddling. It’s strange, I’ve met a lot of people who did albums on that same card, such as Four Tet, for example. It’s a brilliant-sounding card.
“I was using a desktop in those days,” he continues. “It could handle a fair amount of tracks – maybe 64. It hasn’t really changed since. I have a laptop now, but I’m not really one for changing anything. I’m still using Cubase, albeit a slightly later version – I think this one is from 2003 – and the card is an Edirol Audio Capture, which sounds great. In fact, my computer has no power at all – it’s completely knackered and occasionally has to be sent off to be revived.”
So, dare we ask, are there any software instruments in that old PC? “No,” says Jon. “There aren’t actually many synths on this album. Sound Forge is my main tool. I record stuff into that, including a lot of piano and other stuff, whatever I needed. It’s all done in Sound Forge and I can’t see a better way of doing it than that, because I use so many levels of processing that there is no other system I could use.”
Forging sound
We’re quite amazed at the sound that Jon gets from this setup, and he demonstrates just how flexible it is by revealing how he processed the beats on one of the tracks from his new album, Insides. “I always start off a track by drumming a basic rhythm, record it straight into Sound Forge without a click, use markers for each of the beats, bring it into Cubase and adjust the tempo until it’s a perfect loop.
These markers in Sound Forge enable you to switch between different regions perfectly, and every one can be separated out as a different file, with each new file having an infinite chain of things you can do to it.”
Essentially, Jon is making all the edits within Sound Forge, with Cubase simply referencing each updated file – although unlimited undos enable Jon to access all of the file history.
“The really annoying thing is that this method only works with specific versions of each program,” he notes, “so I don’t upgrade to avoid them upsetting each other! I have identical clones of this computer in case it breaks, too!”
Watching Jon work with this setup is actually quite inspiring – he knows it so well that he can get pretty much everything he wants from it. The genius is in how he operates within these self-imposed limitations, and where he sources the initial sounds…
“A lot of the beat effects are from real sounds,” he reveals. “If you’ve ever watched a digital TV where the reception isn’t very good, it makes this horrible, nasty, glitchy noise every few minutes and is really loud! I got really obsessed with making those noises into patterns, and a lot of the album’s title track is made up of these sounds going into reverbs or using lots of EQs to crossfade them in and out and make them into drum-type things.”
Jon then goes on to explain that all the effects he uses are also within Sound Forge, although some of his EQing comes from Waves Renaissance EQ, with a hardware Eventide effects box that he breaks out occasionally. “And then there are all these old Hyperprism effects that I use,” he adds. “They’re so old and crash so often, but they’re great and really sound good. I use and abuse them a lot.”
Hopkins is clearly at home with this system, so has he deliberately limited himself to it, almost to the point where he’s had to become an expert in it to get the best from it? “Yes, although part of it is laziness,” he laughs. “I know Pro Tools well enough to mix and do basic editing, but I know this system so much better after 11 years of using it that I feel I can do anything I want with it.
I’ve seen newer software like Beat Detective that will do a lot of what Sound Forge does for you, but I actually find that my thinking time is done when I’m doing the manual jobs. While I’m in Sound Forge, working on a sample, putting a marker here or there, my mind is asking, ‘Where is the sound going’, or some other train of thought. And if you take that process out of the equation, when is your brain supposed to find the time to come up with those thoughts?”
Has he ever been tempted to load up some new plug-in synths and effects?
“My only exposure to those is at the Coldplay studio,” he says. “They have a huge range of them and Rick Simpson, their in-house producer, is great with them. He’s also shown me things like Omnisphere, which is really great, as well as some amazing orchestral software. A lot of things we did for Coldplay’s album involved the two of us using things like Celemony’s Melodyne program and all sorts of other things. He even uses Melodyne to compose.”
Fix you
How did Jon end up working with Coldplay?
“It was through Brian Eno,” he says. “He bought me in to jam with them initially."
So, how did Jon get to work with the legendary Eno in the first place?
“He heard some of my stuff through Leo Abrahams, a friend of mine who’s been working with Brian for a few years. They invited me to Brian’s studio about six years ago. We worked on his album Another Day On Earth. I contributed towards two songs on that. After that, he disappears for some time, only to ring up every now and then, saying, ‘Do you want to jam with so and so?’. Eventually, he calls to ask if I want to jam with Coldplay!"
We ask Jon how he felt upon arriving at their studio for the first time.“Terrified!” he says, laughing. “I think it helped having been brought in by Brian, as they’d already been working with him for a couple of months and really enjoying the experience. It was very nerve-racking.
I was nervous about the thought of going in the room with these people. I’ve always been a fan of their writing and it was an album I really wanted to get involved in. They were exploring this idea of working with different musicians at the time. We got on really well and had a nice day of playing, and they asked me back the next week, so it just kind of kept going – I spent most of 2007 doing it. I was doing co-production on some tracks and additional production on others.
We thought there was a place for sonic experimentation and expansion of their sound.”
“Initially I came in more as a keyboard player, so I’d take my Trinity and Eventide along and just make some sounds – some of these are on the final versions, but really I wanted to get in with my computer stuff as well. Eventually I got Sound Forge running! I think it was important to go in quietly and gradually prove that it could add something – slip it on the odd song when no one was listening!”
Which is exactly how it panned out, but Jon couldn’t imagine what would happen next…
“Half way through the process, I played them Light Through The Veins off my album. Before that, I’d been a bit nervous to actually say, ‘Listen to what I do’!”
As the story goes, the band loved the track so much that they decided to use it to open and close the album.
“I’m really proud of it,” says Jon. “They come onstage to that piece, and who’s not going to like it when 20,000 people get up to your song? Admittedly, no one knows that I wrote it, but it still feels amazing that everyone recognises that piece. They play it again at the end of the concert, too. Yeah, it just feels amazing.”
Working with Coldplay hasn’t tempted Jon to change his approach to production– why would it when his set up works so well for him?
“The only reason I would change is if the instruments I have at my disposal changed what I write,” he says, and with such a varied sound on his new album, we certainly can’t see any real reason for him to do things differently.
“The new album has a very different edge in comparison to the first two,” he continues. “I wanted to capture the two elements that I’m most into music-wise. I love really dark, heavy stuff that just attacks you, like a lot of the Warp Records stuff, but I absolutely love almost silent, minimal, acoustic stuff, too. Plus, I adore the idea of having nothing between these two contrasting elements; having them sit as polar opposites, but at the same time keeping the electronics as electronics and the acoustics as acoustics. It enables you to really spread everything out across the whole spectrum.”
What has Jon’s experience left him with ambition-wise? Having worked with one of the biggest bands out there, what are his musical goals these days? “It’s made me want to make stranger things, to go more deviant musically,” he says. “Part of me admires great pop writing, but my current label, Domino Records, is a brilliant for doing strange and wonderful things, so I also want to do more collaborations. I’m doing a joint artist album with King Creosote – something with vocals and an experimental side. The whole electronic music thing is great now, but I want to avoid the immediate trends, so there will be no trace of the 80s! I listen to it and love it, but I don’t want to follow anything.”
Just like his setup, Jon’s route to success hasn’t been a straightforward one. However, we can all learn from the fact that getting to know your software inside out can prove so much more rewarding than constantly throwing new plug-ins at your computer. What final advice would Jon offer on this front?
“Don’t be taught anything – just get on with it! I’m guessing that if I started now, the current software enables you to do anything with a bit of imagination; but I would say you should doggedly stick with something that you like. I think most people end up sticking roughly with their first system – I mean, if you start off with Pro Tools, you’re unlikely to change over at any point.
It may be total bollocks – I don’t know – but all software seems to have enough power for most applications, so don’t be lured by anything – just get on with it!”
This interview was originally published in issue 141 of Computer Music in July 2009
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