Listen to Hopkins’ cover of Roger and Brian Eno’s track Wintergreen now.
Jon Hopkins is releasing a four-track EP comprised of piano covers. The project, which is aptly-titled Piano Versions, sees Hopkins reworking tracks from Thom Yorke, Roger and Brian Eno, Luke Abbott and James Yorkston into ambient, piano-led versions. Watch a visualiser for lead track Wintergreen below.
Hopkin’s first unveiled his cover of Thom Yorke’s Dawn Chorus back in December. “I felt such bliss the first time I heard this piece,” said Hopkins in a statement issued at the time. “It seemed so mysterious and hypnotic, oblique but warm. I thought there was so much beauty in that chord sequence that there was room to explore it on the piano and see what grew from it.”
Speaking on the new EP, Hopkins says, “Piano Versions is four minimal, ambient piano covers of songs I have loved for a long time but that come from very different places.”
“It seems to me that melody is universal and the ones that I really connect to shine out irrespective of genre or context, whether from techno, folk or whatever. I loved the simplicity of having my old upright piano be the centre of a whole record for the first time. But the importance of letting the outside world into the recordings is as present for me as ever, so there are layers of incidental noise, bird song, the sound of someone washing up in the studio kitchen – whatever was going on outside my room is included and even accentuated.”
“I want people to hear not just the recordings but to feel how it felt to be there and make them. It was a deep experience.”
Domino will digitally release Piano Versions on 16 April, with a physical release date scheduled for 2 July. Pre-order here.
