Jon Hopkins' new installation will “induce trips behind listeners' eyelids”

Jon Hopkins has soundtracked and helped create an installation which can induce hallucinations.

By combining flickering lights and electronic music, Hopkins, with the help of neuroscientists, philosophers and trance music producers, has formed an out of this world experience for users called ‘Dreamachine’.

The new project uses ambient music from Hopkins as a soundtrack to the experience, which researchers called “stroboscopically induced visual hallucinations.”

It sees visitors enter a room, lie-down and close their eyes before the experience begins.

“The important thing about these practices is the loss of ego and the beginning of shared experience,” Hopkins told The Guardian. “These are alternatives to our problem-solving, scientific consciousness of reality.”

The project will tour the UK this spring and more information can be found here.

Earlier this month, Hopkins shared his first new music of 2022 – ‘A Gathering Of The Tribe’.

The track is described as a sonic companion piece to Hopkins’ meditative 2021 album, ‘Music For Psychedelic Therapy’, which came out in November.

Speaking about the new piece, which was originally written with the intention of scoring an animated short film featuring an excerpt from Charles Eisenstein’s book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, Hopkins said: “I haven’t done much scoring in the last few years, but occasionally something comes along that I fall in love with and feel like I just have to work on. My friend Aubrey Marcus showed me an early version of this stunning Aldous Massie animation he produced when I was in Austin last September.

“The theme, the imagery and the colours all resonated so deeply. I wrote a chord structure to follow the arc of the story, then sent it to Vylana Marcus, who sang the beautiful vocal lines that you can hear on top. Thank you to Charles Eisenstein for writing this story.”