Jon Hopkins Quotes

Music and space collide for me, as I find them incredibly stimulating.

When I began making electronic music, the only thing I was thinking about was creating music that I really liked. I didn't think about what effect it would have; I was busy doing it.

The drone is a very fundamental part of my music, although it's not always present.

I was about 18 when I started making music, making beats. My mindset was totally different.

For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

When I first started out, I was making really slow, psychedelic ambient music because it was all I could do.

Somehow, magically, I've become an electronic musician, and I have a recording studio that looks like the bridge of the Enterprise.

I feel like have a lot of music left to cut in my life.

I saw a DJ from Germany called Sven Vath. I saw him in the club, he played for six hours and I was just totally intrigued, because everything he played I'd never heard before and everything he did I'd never seen before. I was so blown away by what he did.

I like really sparse electronics, lush arrangements, and interesting chord structures.

When I turned 14, I became very obsessed with writing songs, and it took over my existence.

With guitar, I'd always mixed more sounds that occur in hip-hop, or occur on Crystal Method records, or occur at the zoo - so I've never been sort of tethered or have limited myself to the traditional rock n' roll vocabulary.

I will never stop making music.

I'd be making beats pretty much every day after school and it just grew and grew. I wasn't precious about my music. I just loved creating and putting stuff out there.

When I started making my tracks in the style that people call tropical house, I didn't do it on purpose to make it sound tropical. I made whatever I felt sounded good. I just wanted to make my own thing, and then suddenly people started calling it tropical ... I'm like, 'Yeah, that's probably a good name for it.'

A lot of my favourite songs have Eno involved, but I love the work he does on the first two Roxy Music albums. He's creating atmospheres as opposed to composition, and it's a beautiful mixture with everything else in that band.

I think you can go too far into your subgenres. When you're talking about chillstep and stuff like that, I think you've gone a bit too far.

Me making music happened not even from a desire to make records.

I just think it's good to have a big, living, breathing piece of music that's not just songs.

EDM has trained a new generation of listeners' ears to accept a much broader range of what equals a song. EDM has become top 40 stuff: those sounds, those styles, those ways of thinking about song structure - even thinking that vocals aren't necessarily the central element - those ideas have made their way into popular culture.

I became obsessed with Simian Mobile Disco's music and poorly attempted to make my own techno music.

I think, in the early years, my biggest influences would have been... Daft Punk was a huge one for me, I bought their main record when I was nine; at a young age, I was into music. The Prodigy, Gorillaz were big ones.

Music feels so environmental to me, especially the process of working with synths or mixing. I started thinking about music as a psychological landscape as well. It's a landscape of the mind.

If you write your own lyrics now, and those are the main focus in the EP... people tend to approach it as Americana, which is wild. That's what leads people to it. But it's just whatever people want; as long as they like the music.

On 'Utopia,' I mix sick beats with ethereal elements while trying to keep the focus very much on the songwriting. If you strip any of these songs down to just the vocal and a piano, there's a real song in there.