Jon Hopkins’ ‘Dreamachine’ Designed to Induce Hallucinations

Jon Hopkins composed the music for and assisted in the creation of a hallucinogenic installation. Hopkins has created an out of this world experience for users called ‘Dreamachine’ by merging flickering lights and electronic music with the support of neuroscientists, philosophers, and trance music producers.

The brand-new project incorporates ambient music by Hopkins as a soundtrack for the “stroboscopically induced visual hallucinations” described by the researchers. Before the experience begins, visitors enter a chamber, lie down, and close their eyes.

“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.”

This spring, the project will tour the UK. Hopkins released his first new song of 2022, ‘A Gathering Of The Tribe,’ earlier this month. Hopkins’ meditative 2021 album, ‘Music For Psychedelic Therapy,’ was released last November, and the tune is touted as a sonic companion piece to it.

Hopkins said of the new piece, which was 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’, “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.”

—Silviya.Y