Jon Hopkins Tickets

Jon Hopkins In Concert

Few artists straddle opposing worlds as gracefully as Jon Hopkins, a British electronic musician and producer. He has collaborated with Brian Eno, scored films, produced platinum-selling rock bands, and explored the outer limits of techno on his albums Immunity and Singularity. 

His versatility may be a factor in his long history as a team player. Hopkins, born in 1979, studied piano in his childhood and bought his first synthesizer by the age of 15. After graduating high school, he joined Imogen Heap's backing band and dove headfirst into the life of a studio and touring musician.

Beginning in 2001, he released three solo albums within seven years — Opalescent, Contact Note, and Insides, exploring a mixture of piano composition, ambient atmosphere, and downtempo beats. But he spent much of the decade also working in the background, playing on records by Brian Eno, King Creosote, David Holmes, Natalie Imbruglia, and others. His contributions to Eno's 2005 album Another Day on Earth proved pivotal: The celebrated British producer brought Hopkins on board for the sessions for Coldplay's 2008 album Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends. Hopkins ended up co-producing several songs, and his own "Light Through the Veins" was reworked into the album's bookending songs, "Life in Technicolor" and "The Escapist."

That experience served as the springboard to an extensive list of collaborations, including work with the English folk band Tunng, the choreographer Wayne McGregor, and Eno and Hopkins' friend Leo Abrahams, a fellow alum of Imogen Heap's backing band. Following Hopkins, Eno, and Abrahams' work on the 2009 soundtrack to Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones (Hopkins' film credits also include 2010's Monsters and 2013's How I Live Now), the trio regrouped for 2010's Small Craft on a Milk Sea, an album of ambient and experimental electronic music for Warp Records. Hopkins' most notable collaboration from the period might be Diamond Mine, his Mercury Prize-nominated 2011 album with the Scottish singer/songwriter King Creosote.

Where Hopkins' first 15 years were largely collaborative, his biggest triumphs came with his solo albums, 2013's Immunity and 2018's even more expansive, GRAMMY-nominated Singularity. Both releases take the sounds and rhythms of techno and stretch them to psychedelic, cinematic extremes. Those albums form the source material for his mind-bending, multisensory live shows, in which lasers, projections, and immersive lighting displays render his larger-than-life musical vision in even more vivid terms.