Jon Hopkins & Ólafur Arnalds Collaborate With NASA For New Single “Forever Held”

Jon Hopkins & Ólafur Arnalds Collaborate With NASA For New Single “Forever Held”

The British electronic auteur Jon Hopkins has had an extremely busy year. He released his album RITUAL over the summer, and since then he’s contributed to the deluxe edition of Coldplay’s new album Moon Music and to Charli XCX’s Brat remix LP. Now, Hopkins has a new single that he created in collaboration with NASA, which feels like some kind of final stage for producers who are interested in the infinite.

Jon Hopkins created the sweeping, romantic instrumental “Forever Held” in collaboration with NASA Creative Director Erica Bernhard, and it was commissioned specifically for NASA’s new immersive exhibit Space For Earth, which is open to the public at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. The track has a string arrangement from Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds, and it definitely sounds like something that would’ve soundtracked an IMAX documentary that I would’ve seen at the Air & Space Museum as a kid. Coldplay actually already sampled “Forever Held” on the intro to “Moon Music,” the title track of their new album.

“Forever Held” is inspired by love letters that Erica Bernhard wrote from earth to space. Bernhard ended those letters with the phrase “forever enveloped in your gravity.” In a press release, Jon Hopkins says, “I took this opportunity to create a full orchestral piece. I wanted to make something timeless that would transmit the feeling of being ‘held’ by the Earth. I was thinking about the fragility and power of our planet, and of the human race’s role in its own destiny.” Erica Bernhard made the song’s music video, in which celestial-looking human bodies float upward into space. See it below.

“Forever Held” is out now on Domino.

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