chills

My Choices Are Not My Own feat. Tawiah, May Kaspar (Bredren remix)

Buy Emergence: http://maxcooper.lnk.to/Emergence

I started this track with a simple Prophet patch running through a Moog ring mod with loads of overdrive. It wasn't so much overdrive that it became aggressive, but enough so that it had a simple tonal quality overlaid with plenty of honest low-fi grittyness. Sometimes all it takes is getting that first timbral feature right for the rest of the track to flow from there, and this was a good example for me. 

I also knew I wanted the track to fit later on in the Emergence story, where it should be rhythmically straight enough to fit into a club show where needed, but also for the part of the show where we explore visually, the range of complex living forms and evolutionary change - it needed to capture some of that beauty of life's morphogenetic creativity.

I found the chord sequence fairly quickly, and built the drums and smooth dynamics within a few days, but I got stuck on how to complete the track. I tried hundreds of different ideas, and thought I might need to bin the project, but then luckily stumbled across some old synth jam recordings that had some moments that sounded ok. So I jumped on those and went to work on an editing job. 

It turned out that a lot of the problem I had been having was that I was trying to add too much, when for me, the chords were the hook, and what was needed was a sparse melodic addition to support the chords rather than any sort of traditional tuneful hook. In recent years I've been more and more drawn to just chord sequences as the main features of tracks musically, with the rest stripped away. When Ryan Rival Consoles was considering a remix he commented the album seemed to be all about the chords (or something to that extent), so I guess that idea is in there. Chords just seem to carry the most emotion for me for some reason (as opposed to melodies or lyrics for example).

So there it is, I hope you like the track!

Emergence

12"/Download/LP Stream

Organa [Mesh001]

I'm excited to announce the first track from the 'Emergence Remixed' album which will be released in full at the end of March.

This remix comes from one of my absolute favourite electronic producers of the last few years, and someone who is constantly surprising me with each new release - Rival Consoles. 

I've been playing his work in my sets a lot recently too, he's got a great humanised approach to making electronic music, primarily with his hands-on analogue machines and live percussion, which give his tracks a whole load more life than most other producers. 

I have to mention Rival Consoles synth work too, which for me, is the best out there by a mile. He's got a knack for the most beautiful timbral quality and soft full sound. Complemented with his ability for hooks and chords and always developing arrangements, makes for some of the best electronic music out there in my opinion.

So all that said, you can see why I said I was excited to have him involved in the remix package! He's made a brewing club track for this package, all about those beautiful synths and micropitch deviations for me, the quality oozes out with him needing to overcomplicate the mix (like I do!). It's really hard to get each element to such quality to carry a track like that....so hats off from me, and I hope you enjoy it too.

Loads more amazing remixes coming soon from more of my favourite producers - it's a juicy package! We'll put some out to the mailing list first, which you can join below at the end of this description.

The artwork is by Andy Lomas, from his Aggregation series, where he created a simulation of sticky particles which bounce around and are more likely to stick to larger structures, causing biological-esc growth-like structures to emerge. I have one of his huge prints from this series on my wall, the detail at high res is amazing. 

The series was chose for the Emergence album packages as it demonstrates the same principles of mathematical rules yielding unexpected and beautiful outcomes as is shown in the visual story to which the album tracks were scored. Lots of those videos are on this youtube channel, and the whole thing will be released in surround-sound bluray format later this year.

From 'Emergence Remixed', out March 31
Pre-order 'Emergence Remixed' http://MaxCooper.lnk.to/Remixed
Buy 'Emergence' http://MaxCooper.lnk.to/Emergence
Subscribe to hear the next remixes first, free mixes, gig tickets etc (the "JOIN" button is top right): http://www.maxcooper.net

Distant Light (Rival Consoles Remix) [Mesh002]

Released 24 November on Mesh

For more info and exclusive music head to https://maxcooper.net/#join

World Passing By

Stacked Moments

Stream / Download

Stacked Moments [Mesh004]

Taken from the new album 'One Hundred Billion Sparks', released 20 Sept - pre-order with tour tickets at https://MaxCooper.lnk.to/Hope

After spending a month in complete isolation at a remote cottage in Wales, Max Cooper presents ‘One Hundred Billion Sparks’, his third studio album, in which he interrogates notions of identity whilst profiling the complex mechanisms that make us all wonderfully unique. 
 
The first single of the album, 'Hope', sees Max retain the duality for which his work is known for, dissonant harmonies ring across vast, cinematic soundscapes driven forward by static bass and skeletal percussion. The track was designed around a video collaboration with Thomas Vanz, charting the epic journey of atoms inside the brain, as it creates our experience with its one hundred billion sparking neurons. 

One Hundred Billion Sparks tour:
13 Sep - Amsterdam, Melkweg
15 Sept - Budapest, We Are Cre8tion
20 Sep - London, Koko 
22 Sep - Nantes, Scopitone Festival
25 Sep - Santander, Centro Botin
04-06 Oct - Brighton, ACCA [Aether]
06 Oct - Rome, Spring Attitude Festival, Ex Dogana
12 Oct - Yverdon-les-Bains, L'Amalgame
18 Oct - Paris, Gaîté Lyrique
03-07 Nov – Hasselt, IMPACT [Aether]
08 Nov - Brussels, AB
10 Nov - Berlin, Funkhaus
16 Nov - Dublin, Button Factory
24 Nov - Cologne, Artheater

For tickets, pre-orders and more info go to www.maxcooper.net

One Hundred Billion Sparks

Hope

Full LP-Stream-12"-CD

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.

Buy/Stream/LP/CD

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Max Cooper is an electronic composer, multi-disciplinary artist, music label founder and former scientist who has carved out a unique space in music and visual art.

He holds a PhD in computational biology at the same time as being the first contemporary electronic musician to perform at the ancient Acropolis theatre in Athens and one of the first clutch of musicians to produce in Dolby Atmos.

Cooper has enquired for over 15 years through music, collaborations, and his label Mesh, to explore the intersections between the arts and sciences with installations, performances, immersive experiences, online media, music videos and live events.  Anchored throughout is his emotive approach, connecting how ideas and forms feel, in a manner accessible to us all. 
 
As an artist synonymous with the evolution of club culture, Cooper honed his craft as a DJ with a 10 year residency at legendary Midlands techno event Firefly where he formed a foundational relationship with Architecture Social Club, with whom he still collaborates on extravagant immersive installations.

"I want to encourage the acceptance of electronic music as an art form like any other. Bringing electronic music and abstract audio-visual projects into concert halls, museums and galleries is liberating - the art world opens up doors to communicate in ways that aren’t possible elsewhere."
  
Pivoting from computational biology to electronic music might not seem like the most natural career transition, but for Cooper the commonalities are obvious:
 
"In both fields, you're in a sense, free. Free from the limits of living systems, free from the limits of corporeal sound. The only constraints are in your mind."

www.maxcooper.net 

Contacts:
Management: James Palmer-Bullock, The Wild Seeds - james@thewildseeds.com 
Label: Anthony Faulkner, Mesh – anthony@thewildseeds.com 
PR: Neil Bainbridge, Neighbourhood PR - neil@nbhd-group.com 
Radio: Matthew Maxey, Enganche - matthew@enganche.co.uk