Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic On a warm July day at the ICA arts centre in London, fans of the electronic producer and composer Jon Hopkins gathered inside the darkened main room. They settled on soft floor mats and closed their eyes, ready to spend 41 minutes, the length of Hopkins’ new album Ritual, listening intently together.A sharp intake of breath on the album signalled the start of the music, played in spatial audio so that it was like being cloaked in sound: drones so deep they gave your rib cage a massage, pulses throbbing like heartbeats, a celestial voice soothing the nervous system, all building to an earth-shattering core of slow, hypnotic drums. The idea, says Hopkins, is to “surrender” to the music. “I feel like sound needs to be brought back to its true importance,” he says. “It’s a sacred thing.”The musician, 45, has been putting on events like these across the summer, including in Glastonbury’s new ambient tree-lined area. Though Hopkins was not performing at the festival this time, it was a big year for his music: over on the Pyramid stage, Coldplay — who he has been working with since 2008’s Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends — opened their show with his orchestral piece “Forever Held”.Hopkins is known for blending these symphonic sensibilities with virtuosic electronic production, boshing techno and ambient textures, an immersive style he has developed across solo albums and film scores including the 2010 British sci-fi Monsters, which was Ivor Novello-nominated.The 2023 documentary Wilding, which he co-scored, was a classic example of what draws him to projects: “The rewilding movement is something I was already fascinated by and I had visited Knepp Estate for many years in a row before being approached.”Hopkins’ output has been evolving since he started playing keyboards as a child. In the late 1990s, he was in Imogen Heap’s backing band, then released a debut album, Opalescent, several tracks from which were, bizarrely, licensed to Sex and the City. His collaborations are varied, from folk musicians (King Creosote) and choreographers (Wayne McGregor) to art installations and rave remixes. Since his 2013 breakthrough album Immunity, he has become a fixture at major dance music festivals. But Hopkins’ beats have become less designed for getting out of your head and more about going further inside it. “The thing that is becoming clear is that I can offer this inner-looking experience,” he says.At his serene home in east London, complete with recording studio, infrared sauna and roaming cat called Magic, Hopkins contemplates his new direction. His cosmic side has always crept into his albums — he has long practised transcendental meditation — but now he sees them more as “functional” tools for spiritual assistance than purely for entertainment. And then there’s the tripping. Following Immunity, he released an album inspired by magic mushrooms (2018’s Singularity) and another constructed from field recordings from a cave in Ecuador, timed to the average length of a ketamine high: 2021’s astounding Music for Psychedelic Therapy.Hopkins made the album amid his own mind-bending voyages, and he says it has since been adopted as a soundtrack at clinics in the US where psychedelic-assisted therapies have been legalised. “You create the music you want to hear,” says Hopkins. “That’s the inspiration.” Feedback includes “war veterans who’ve had ketamine therapy to that album and got in touch to say that it saved their life”.Ritual is Hopkins’ next frontier — a sibling to Music for Psychedelic Therapy. It is a continuous piece, the stages (build-up, climax, release, reset) signified by gothic track titles such as “altar” and “evocation”. It is intended to be ceremonial: “It could sound like whatever ritual you want it to. I want people to find their own use for it. Breathwork is a big part of it, which is why it starts with the breath, and then towards the end of the climax, Vylana is breathing in rhythm.”Vylana is a self-billed “visionary sound alchemist” and one of the album collaborators who you could clearly identify as New Age. Hopkins is keen to challenge perceptions of that term: it’s “about taking the genre seriously”, he says. “Sonically in particular. I wanted it to be mixed with the weight of a serious techno record.”Hopkins is well aware of New Age clichés and is keen to distance himself from any shamanic connotations — although he does see his work as a musical accompaniment to an intense personal journey. “While I do not claim to have shamanic capabilities,” he says, “what I’m trying to do is a modern version of guiding you in that vulnerable space, whether you’re taking anything or not.” The making of Ritual helped to get him out of a rut. “Last June it was 10 years since Immunity came out and I wasn’t in a great zone,” he says. “I remember looking back and thinking: despite having all this material success, I don’t feel things are better. I’m not someone who struggles with depression, but definitely anxiety, and I felt quite lost. But then this album, and particularly gathering in the collaborators, completely shifted things and started what feels like a new chapter.” Writing the album, he continues, “had a profound effect on me. Honestly, when you’re writing sometimes, it feels like it’s going to solve all the problems. It’s the feeling we chase. Without that, we wouldn’t have the propulsion to get to the end.”Someone recently told Hopkins that “rituals are like architecture, but for time”. They “were there to mark important events in the year and, in some cases, were the veil between this world and the spiritual world.” He laments that today’s rituals have lost their substance and become “materialistic, meaningless”.A modern one could be the pleasure of being in a room, losing yourself in a new album. That is the environment in which Ritual will probably stay for now: both of Hopkins’ last two releases are practically impossible to recreate live. His days of being a face-melting techno act are not over yet, but he wants to play less these days. “I don’t want people thinking I wasn’t having a good time on stage,” he says, but being a performer was “sort of an accident. I wanted to make albums. The more energy you put into performing what you’ve already done, the less there is left to create something new.”‘Ritual’ is released on August 30
