Quotes from Jon Hopkins

Meditation is a regular part of my day, every day.

As a teenager, you don't really have restraint.

It is funny how we talk about nature as this separate entity when we are nature, and nature is us.

No, I'm a quite big believer in not being in the studio if I don't feel like being in there.

Nothing competes with the buzz of making your own record.

A night out isn't just chaos and hedonism. It can be beautiful as well and there's a sadness to the end of it.

As soon as I finish meditating, I get a beautiful feeling of expanded consciousness. When I'm in this headspace I can make so much progress in my writing.

I have the inability to stop thinking and switch off from work at night, which causes a lot of sleeplessness.

It's great to do something that makes your brain just switch to a different mode, and music can do that really powerfully.

I just love switching stuff off and going for a run, or sitting down and eating cake.

That's the thing with electronic music, you set up systems to bring in an accident, to bring in quirks you didn't choose, but you still will have had to set up systems.

I love truly forward-thinking music, and I'm not even sure I'd describe my work as that, even.

When you've got hardly any equipment, very little money and no access to any information, your sound is very much dictated by you, your setup and what you're listening to. Nothing more.

Ironically, my tastes aren't that experimental, and I wouldn't describe my music on the surface as being overtly experimental, either.

I always liked the idea of shaving the back of my head and getting a tattoo of my own face there so that, whichever way I was looking, I could freak people out.

I did classical music when I was a teenager, but the experience of performing a classical concert felt too frighteningly pristine for me to continue with it.

You can't allow your creative sessions to be dominated by miniscule editing processes.

I'm more akin to things like Sigur Ros, Mogwai, possibly. But when I'm making solo electronic music, techno stuff is just the most exciting form of rhythm.

I don't want to make an album which is full of brutal and jarring techno.

My own personality is fairly optimistic and generally very happy, but like everyone else I've been through difficult stuff, particularly in my teenage years, where I experienced enough melancholia to feed any number of electronic records.

Some machine-y music is great, but you can apply any groove to any song now - there's literally a massive drop-down menu on most programs. And that's what takes the human being out of the process.

I was always fascinated particularly with synths: how they looked and stuff that when you're a kid you're like this is the most incredible thing in the world just to play.

I love that tension between machine sounds and organic sounds, and also the contrast between abrasive sounds and soft sounds.

I got this pretend grass stuff called LazyLawn on my roof. Now I can go out on my terrace in bare feet, and it looks exactly like a lawn. This is what science should be for.