Dance Playlist

https://www.facebook.com/Petrels
http://petrels.bandcamp.com/
http://floatinglimb.com/
https://twitter.com/bowed_idly

Remix of the track 'Fragments of Self' from 'Fragmented Self' by Max Cooper and Tom Hodge.

http://www.fieldsldn.net/

When trying to make creative decisions based on the results of somebody else's process it makes you try things out that perhaps you wouldn't normally think of and I'd say with every remix I've ever done I've come away with something new.  Sometimes its interesting to take a track in a completely new direction but in the case of Max and Tom's collaboration I was immediately drawn to the subtle harmonic undercurrent of the synth lines beneath the main piano parts and figured it would be interesting to put together an arrangement that brought that to the fore. 

I started with a rough layering and overlay of the piano samples - trying to re-arrange them into different combinations than in the original to create something that had the same feel (on a side note, its always pleasing to work with recordings like this of instruments that sound played - i.e., you can hear the movement of the pedals and the fingers on the keys rather than a surgically-extracted sequence of notes) but that came to the main melodies from a different angle.  I can't really compete with Max's glitchy rhythmic production and since this is so distinctive it seemed like a bit of a cop-out to make too much use of these samples in any case so in the end the main part of what I used of the rhythm was a short kick drum sample that I processed in various ways to create the studded melodic cross-rhythm that I used for most of the middle of the track.

With the bare bones in place the majority of the rest of the work came from layering up the arrangement with the kinds of synths and strings that I make use of in my Petrels stuff.  Like I said, I was drawn to the low root synth line in the original that casts a subtle melodic shade over the piano lines so using this as a starting point I slowly built up the orchestration around it so as to make it much more of a focal point.  In the end, hopefully the result is something akin to a huge group of assorted musicians attempting a spontaneous live version of what essentially started as a duet performance. Well that was the idea anyhow.

Max Cooper & Tom Hodge - Fragments of Self (Petrels Remix)

DJ Manny - What You Need (feat. DJ Spinn)

The Man-Machine

The Model (2009 Remaster)

The Robots (2009 Remaster)

Endtroducing

What Does Your Soul Look Like, Pt. 4 (Teklife Remix)

Afterlife

Let's Roll Out

Do You Wanna Be Mine

Oh God

Pass That

Roll Up That Loud

Sometimes the chords are all I need and I don't want to muddy the waters with much else. This was one of those tracks, so I decided to avoid any big drums and just let Christian's beautiful melody and my added Prophet chords grow a little throughout, held together with some vocals from the original looped up. It's just a simple piece of music.

Full remix package here: https://christian-loeffler.33r.pm/mare-reworks

Christian Löffler - Haul - Max Cooper Remix

I had a lot of train journeys recently and I love watching the wires seemingly dance around outside the window. I wondered if we could be getting fooled by a similar process during our usual experience of movement and time, and thought it would be an interesting project for a music video set to the music created during the same journeys.

You can find that project and a longer explanation of the video ideas here: https://vimeo.com/241546182

For the music I wanted to bring ideas of frozen moments of the past into play, and no better excuse to get stuck in with the Prophet 6 on some lush classic analogue synth sounds for the main chord sequence, and plenty of nob noodling for a dance of modulating sounds around the main sequence. I wanted to keep it fairly sparse to let the chord patch be central, and just focus on trying to make every element, including the percussion, warp a little, so you can either listen to the track from a distance and hear the harmonic ideas, or delve in to find all sorts more hiding in there.

You can hear the whole EP here: https://lnk.to/WorldPassingByEP

Whole EP Stream/Buy

Resynthesis [Mesh004]

BIG shout to @dj-spinn-1 & Teklife 

Forthcoming APHA017 - Philip D Kick - Pathways

Pre-order - http://bit.ly/APHA017_BC
Ltd Edition 12” Vinyl / Digital / Risograph Print / Tshirt

Released: 1st June 2018 on @Astrophonica

A1. In Formation
A2. Work That
AA1. Drown
AA2. Vibe Off (feat DJ Spinn)
AA3. For Real

Philip D Kick - Vibe Off (feat DJ Spinn) [Astrophonica]

Taken from the new album 'One Hundred Billion Sparks', released 20 Sept.

Buy / stream: https://maxcooper.lnk.to/ohbs

It's hard to know what to say when it's the release day of a new album. So much time and work and thought and joy and pain goes into the process, and then I need to sum it up in a sentence somehow. All I can say is, I put everything I had into this one, and tried to be as musically honest as I could, I hope some of the ideas and feelings resonate with you.

As with my other releases of recent years I've used a visually related theme and collaborated with visual artists for every track to tell the overall story. I wanted to try and link this theme into my process of creating the album as closely as I could. So I chose a theme of the mind, and spent the first month of the project in total isolation with no outside contact, in order to look inwards for what creates us, and me, to provide content for the music and visuals. 

I named the album "one hundred billion sparks" after the one hundred billion neurons in our heads, and their act of "sparking" to create our experiences. It seemed a nice way to visually summarise what the project was about, and lent itself to the album artwork form, beautiful delivered by Tyler Hobbs with his countless networked fragments. 

The individual chapters of the story stray pretty far from the usual ideas around brains, but that's way too much info to include here, so we've made a little website summarising the whole project, which will be updated with each music video as they're released.

So that's it, I hope you find some music or ideas in there which you enjoy, and I'll be touring the new album AV show in 270 surround visual format wherever possible, so hopefully catch you at one of those gigs sometime soon.

Dance Playlist

Glück im Ohr