JON HOPKINS - “THE DIFFERENCE” / “MAGNETS” TOUR VISUALS

When Jon Hopkins was gearing up for his 2023/2024 tour, he approached 2MS' Dan Tombs, with whom Hopkins has worked for the last fourteen years. In addition to being a close collaborator, Tombs has become a visual curator for Hopkins, working with different music video directors and animators to create a world that perfectly complements Hopkins' music and articulates his vision in a live setting.

In addition to live mixing, triggering, and performing the visuals, Tombs also creates much of the imagery himself. Beginning with his 2023 tour, Hopkins shared his ideas for his remixes of Flume's "The Difference" and Disclosure's "Magnets." Specifically, he wanted each note in the progression to have its own precise, colourful animation triggered by each note of the sequence.

Tombs brought in Jim Warrier, with whom he'd worked on recent tours for Fred Again and Kygo. They used the incoming MIDI stream running from Ableton to Notch for keyframe animation, allowing them to visualise the performance data. They then synced the resulting animations via timecode and augmented them with further effects to give each chapter of each song a distinct identity.

For "Magnets," the creative duo worked from pictures of rock formations Hopkins had taken on holiday and added pulsing lights mapped to the arpeggiated MIDI line from the track. At the sequence's climax, the rocks exploded into a 500,000-particle system, taking the audience on a journey through the rock fields.