While his own albums are never likely to top the sales charts - concept ambient records that are designed to last the length of a ketamine trip rarely do - Jon Hopkins is celebrating the fact that, “in a surprising twist”, two collaborations meant that he recently managed to hit number 1 in both the UK and the US at the same time.
Charli XCX’s ‘Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat’ did the business for him in Britain, with Hopkins appearing alongside The 1975 on the rework of I might say something stupid.
In America, meanwhile, the bacon was brought home by Coldplay, who scored a number 1 album with Moon Music. Hopkins gets an artist credit on the title track, and he’s been reflecting on this and his other collaborations with Chris Martin and co on Instagram.
“My relationship with Coldplay goes back 17 years,” he says. “I was working with Brian Eno a lot when he started producing Coldplay’s Viva La Vida, back in 2007. He asked me to go into the studio and add some sounds and jam with the band a bit, to bring more electronic experimentation into their sound.
“At the time I was in the middle of writing Insides [Hopkins’ third album], and after playing an early version of Light Through the Veins to the band, it ended up forming the intro and outro to that record, which changed a lot of stuff for me and gave me the freedom to really focus on Immunity.
“It’s a relationship that is still going, and includes their most recent album, Moon Music.”
Moon Music's title track has a distinctly Hopkins-esque sound - certainly its first couple of minutes - and it turns out that this isn’t the last we’ve heard of it.
“The title track begins with an adaptation of a new installation piece of mine called Forever Held, which I made in collaboration with Nasa and [artist/scientist] Erica Bernhard,” notes Hopkins. “My version of this will be released next week. I also co-wrote and co-produced A Wave and several others on the album.”
Moon Music was helmed by super-producer Max Martin, and its credits indicate that Hopkins contributed programming, keyboard and synth parts on several of its tracks. Other notable names on the cast list include Ólafur Arnalds (string programming on Moon Music), Nile Rodgers (guitar and a co-write on Good Feelings) and that man Brian Eno, who turns up on album closer One World.
Jacob Collier, meanwhile, brings his backing vocals to Jupiter, while Aeterna features an unlikely sample of Louis Cole’s Weird Part Of The Night.
Jon Hopkins released his latest album, Ritual, earlier this year.
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