His collaborator Kaelen also runs a company called Waveform, which makes AI-generated soundtracks for use in psychedelic therapy. Hopkins is a Waveform investor. Brian Eno is a mentor of sorts to Hopkins, has collaborated with him many times and is also involved. Kaelen took a high quality Fostex field recorder. Hopkins had with him a Bose portable speaker. He put the Bose at one end of the underground cathedral with Kaelen at the other, and he played pieces of music and sound through the speaker for him to record, 50 metres away. One of them was a drone from a crystal bowl, previously recorded by Hopkins; it became the opening soundscape of Music for Psychedelic Therapy.

If someone is going to invite me to do something that I would never do, in an extraordinary place, then ... it seems you have to go for it.

It was very important to me to use the cave as a way of processing the sound. Like a reverb. That had to be the starting point so that it really felt like the music began with the cave and grew out of it, Hopkins explains.

He had already made music for legitimate psychedelic therapy, for Waveform, for use as an adjunct in clinical settings in university research trials. This album is like a commercially available version of those. It includes, at the end, excerpts of a lost talk by the late spiritual teacher Ram Dass.

Like the sharing circle at the end of the session, says Hopkins. His track [Sit Around The Fire, featuring Das and musician East Forest] is very grounded, so its only piano and voice and fire, and a few little bits of processing, but not very much. Whereas everything else on the record is far more difficult to describe in terms of, well, what instrument is that?

In the spirit of Dass, Hopkins wanted to remove himself from the musics imprint and try for the ultimate musical and psychological goal of absolute purity.

Deep in the woods of Devon, in the far south of England, Hopkins collaborated with musician 7Rays. His name is Dan, he says, we have been friends for a very long time. Hes very literally bought that woodland energy into the work. The pair hung speakers from trees to play sounds through them to be recorded and processed.

To me those pieces sound very, very like the experiences Ive had in the DMT realm, says Hopkins. Thats something that weve shared, so theyre almost like downloads from that space, and very, very in tune with the woods.

Hopkins was a late-bloomer with psychedelics. He only put them (and ketamine) into the mix when he reached 35, about seven years ago, shifting his music production in the process increasingly towards stillness.

Ive always had spiritual experiences dating back to teenage years, but I didnt really understand them particularly well until I meditated for a certain amount of time myself and read a certain amount about what might be going on behind that, he says.

The era that were in has become increasingly fraught and unpredictable. I felt like I had no choice but to make something that was so direct. Purity is certainly what I hope people feel from it. I tried to get myself out of the way and let myself be the vessel.

Jon Hopkins performing in Denmark in 2019. He says he will make dance music again, but his latest work conjures stillness.Credit:Getty Images

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He wanted to eliminate the ego by eliminating the dance beats, the kickdrums. I dont denigrate what Ive done before, and I will definitely want to make dance music again. But to get that out of the way left all this space for really exploring the sonics and the melody and what we can do with illusions and dimensions.

Hopkins involvement in psychedelic-assisted therapy for mental illnesses, such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, comes as the field begins to boom worldwide, including in Australia, backed by investors, governments, and institutions including universities. It is only now beginning to be freed from the shackles of Richard Nixons War On Drugs, which created difficulties for clinical researchers testing substances such as MDMA and psilocybin. Research over the past five years has shown them both to be effective in treating depression and PTSD, alongside therapy.

Hopkins calls the substances medicines. The medicines themselves have quite a loud voice in this music. Definitely louder than my own. Theres no actual separation for me between the natural world and those medicines, because they are things that grow in the ground, psilocybin and DMT especially.

I love the poetic idea that this is music that comes from the earth.

Music for Psychedelic Therapy is out now.

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Will this music alter your mind? The most terrifying thing can do that - Sydney Morning Herald