Jon Hopkins Collaborates with NASA on New Single: Listen

You may have heard "Forever Held" on Coldplay's latest album

BY Calum SlingerlandPublished Oct 30, 2024

Jon Hopkins has shared a new single in collaboration with NASA. The English electronic musician and composer's "Forever Held" can be heard below alongside a video.

A full orchestral piece with string arrangements by Icelandic multi-instrumentalist Ólafur Arnalds, "Forever Held" was composed by Hopkins for Space for Earth, an immersive A/V exhibition at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, which invites viewers to experience our changing planet from space.

"I wanted to make something timeless that would transmit the feeling of being 'held' by the Earth," Hopkins shared of the piece in a statement. "I was thinking about the fragility and power of our planet, and of the human race's role in its own destiny."

The song was also inspired by love letters from Earth to Space written by NASA Creative Director and artist Erica Bernhard, who also created and directed the music video below.

The visual creates 'Space' and 'Earth' characters through having NASA imagery and data brought to life by motion-captured dancers; the former comprised of NASA James Webb Space Telescope, and the latter wrapped in satellite imagery of the Earth at night.

"Forever Held" also opens Coldplay's recent album Moon Music, not unlike how Hopkins' "Light Through the Veins" opened the group's Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends way back in 2008.

What's more, "Forever Held," stills from its music video, the original letters and pieces of the Space for Earth installation, have been engraved and encoded onto a NanoFiche disk which will be sent to the moon as part of the Lunar Codex via NASA CLPS.

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