Early Hours can mean a few different things: Are you winding down after being up all night, or are you just rising to meet the sun? For Jon Hopkins, the electronic producer and composer behind this edition of Apple Music’s Early Hours DJ mix, the goal was to soundtrack both settings. “I gave it a kind of arc that starts and ends peacefully, with some more trance-like energising stuff in the middle,” he says. “The Oliver Coates track ‘Prairie’ that opens the set is an amazing thing to set the course of your day with, but it would also act as a bit of a reset, like a moment of clarity after getting home with the noise of a night out still in your ears.” Hopkins says he went above his typical level of creativity with this mix. “I improvised live piano on top of some tracks. I asked Sofia Kourtesis and Mano Le Tough for stems so I could weave in their tracks in a more interesting way. I even field-recorded birdsong for one section that, for some reason, felt like it needed it.” Hopkins says he didn’t think much about headspace or philosophy—these songs were all intuition. “The creativity was figuring out how to blend them together into one hour-long piece,” he says.
- 2018
- 2005
- Nicolas Jaar