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.

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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

Phi

Max Cooper