The former Stump bassist details his new solo album XiX on Dimple Discs.

Transmission 281: Interview with Kev Hopper

Kev Hopper is a British musician, composer, and visual artist whose solo work examines the meeting point between structured pop forms and experimental sound composition. His music combines playful, concrete sampling with deliberate melodic frameworks, producing a style that alternates between harmony and dissonance. The outcome is a body of work often characterized as wonky, electronic, and surrealist pop.

Title: XiX
Release Date: 2025-10-24
Genres: Avant-garde, Electronica, Experimental Music
Label: Dimple Discs
Description: Kev Hopper discusses his new album XiX (Dimple Discs), Euclidean rhythms, surrealist pop, and his creative process in this new interview.

Best known as the co-founder and bass guitarist of the 1980s experimental rock band Stump, Hopper has released fourteen solo albums. His latest project, XiX, out now on Dimple Discs, extends his approach through the use of Euclidean rhythms and digitally altered vocals. He also co-founded the electronica group Ticklish and performed as composer and bassist with Prescott. Hopper also maintains a practice as a painter and interviews other artists via his HopperArts Youtube site.

What first inspired you to make music and why did you choose the bass?

I chose the bass because it only had four strings. I was a bit of a late starter and I didn’t enjoy music lessons at school and I didn’t really have many musical friends. So the bass seemed to be the easiest instrument to play.

As soon as I started playing bass, I had a few people that I looked up to, like Stanley Clarke, Percy Jones, Chris Squire, those kind of players. I suppose my first thought was to emulate those players.

How do your roles as a painter and an interviewer influence your music?

They don’t. They don’t influence each other. I’m a slightly more traditional painter than I am a musician.

My paintings are more conventional, they’re figurative, landscape, portraiture sometimes. And I suppose more academic. In contrast, my music is more… it’s more playful and abstract.

It’s more… yeah, music concrete mixed with pop and jazz. And sampling. And then some bass playing mixed in with it.

I think a painting’s been around for 500 years. It’s more of an established genre. You can only move very slightly in that field.

However, music’s very different from that. I think you can recontextualize so much and come up with things that are more difficult to define genre-wise. So, I think they’re quite different to me.

After 40 years in music, from Stump, experimental rock, to your solo electronic work, what drew you specifically to Euclidean rhythm for your latest album?

I like overlapping rhythms. Rhythms that don’t end up in the same point in the loop. I like music to sound like a continuum.

Not all the time, but some of the time I like it to just… extend past the bar and to have uneven steps in it. I use a program called Reactor. It’s a Native Instruments program.

I can use that to construct Euclidean-kind of instruments. Instruments that trigger MIDI in that kind of way. I like the sound of it.

What musical influences, for example, art, film or literature influenced this album?

I’ve got to a stage now where I’m influenced by my back catalogue. It doesn’t feel like I’ve listened to an album and then thought, oh, I must try some of that anymore. It feels like I listened to the previous albums and try and build on some of the things I thought were interesting in the previous albums, and then try and progress onwards.

There are some people… I like Cristobal Tapia de Veer, the soundtrack composer who did the Utopia soundtrack and… The White Lotus. I like people like him, the use of samples. I admire that.

But I was kind of doing that kind of thing almost 15 years ago, maybe even before that. So, I think because I’ve made a lot of music and I’m getting on, I’m getting old, I tend to look back at my previous recordings. I don’t know if that answers the question.

What is the significance of the album title? And the title is visually symmetrical. How does this idea of symmetry or reflection play out in the music itself?

It doesn’t. That’s purely visual. The symmetry was to do with the album design.

It’s based on a sketch I did. Then I passed it on to my designer. I don’t have ideas about symmetry in music.

In fact, a Euclidean idea is the opposite of symmetry in a way. Yeah, it doesn’t… it’s a counter to that. So, yeah, they don’t match.

You use pop to describe the album. What does pop music mean to you in this experimental and surrealistic context?

I absolutely love pop music. I like chord changes and melodies. I like singing.

I adore it. All my early love of music was for pop. It wasn’t for classical.

It wasn’t for jazz or even avant-garde stuff. It was for pop music. I think it’s a challenge to be able to fit a beautiful chord sequence and a melody in with all this strange noise.

Yeah, my music is a sort of hybrid. It’s a hybrid of melodic and dissonant. That’s the challenge for me.

Is there any theme or narrative concept connecting the tracks on the album?

No, not really. No. I mean, I did digitally alter my voice and lowered it because I don’t think I’m much of a singer.

My singing isn’t great. I can sing in tune, but it’s not a voice I’d want to put all over an album. So I had to think about… my music’s not real.

It’s not. It’s an abstract, concocted music.

So the voice might as well be unreal as well. I do play bass on it, but the whole thing is not real. It’s all constructed out of other things and the sounds. It’s an abstract idea about how to put music together, I think.

Does the album engage with today’s political economic turbulence or is it more inward looking?

No, it’s not. It doesn’t engage at all. I’m a political person.

I have concerns about the world and politics is important to me, but I don’t ever put it in. I don’t put it in the music. I have no interest in putting it in the music.

What’s the weirdest sound on the album and what’s the story behind its creation?

I have hundreds of sounds on my computer.

Some are nearly all created by myself. I have to make a decision about what sound I can pitch up and down to make a melody from, for instance, and what sound would make good chords. Then the other sounds… they’re not pitched and they don’t belong in a key. They’re… you know, they’re out there, they just… they modulate pitch-wise and, velocity-wise.

The whole thing is to try and find out which of these sounds I can fit in, what I can get away with. If I’m playing with something that fits, but is a little bit boring, I will try and find the difficult sound to put in and try and force the melody out of the difficult sound, even if it’s wavering in and out of pitch.

So I can’t really point to one sound in particular on the album that I think is weirder than the others, it’s just an approach to making the music that I’m concerned with.

Sometimes I’ve got a sound and I’m thinking, “That is strange. How am I going to use it?” I do spend a lot of time thinking, where can I put that in?

Can I put it over existing music? Can I put it over chord sequences? No.

Can I use it as a melody? No. Sometimes the sound will go in on its own and be enough.

Besides the software you mentioned earlier, Reactor, I thought it was, what key gear was essential for creating the album sound?

I didn’t use anything special. I just used Logic, Logic Pro. It’s just a normal copy of Logic.

I liked the Sculpture synthesizer in Logic. Then I used the Waves sampler, which I find simple. So I don’t know if that answers your question, but it’s fairly straightforward stuff.

I didn’t do any Max programming or modular stuff, just a bit of Reactor stuff.

Do you plan to perform this album live? And how do you adapt it?

I’m not going to sit down with a computer and just do the tracks. That would be the only way to do it. What I will do is I’ll take my bass, I’ll have some backing tracks and I’ll do an improvised thing.

That tends to be what I do for 20 minutes. So not a big gig… just a small affair. That’s kind of what I do now if I do a gig.

It’s very difficult for me to play loud because I have a problem with tinnitus and hyperacusis sensitivity to loud music.

Are you already working on your material?

The next album? Yeah. Yeah, I’m always working on stuff.

It doesn’t stop. It’s painting or music. Sometimes life takes over and you have to do a lot of admin.

I’ve been back to the family house a lot trying to sort stuff out for my dad and my late mum’s estate and all that. That tends to stop you, stop the continuity.

Photos courtesy of Kev Hopper

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others