Max Cooper - Lockdown AV Session


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Hey, I hope all is ok at your end of the screen, wherever you are. For the last few years Ive been experimenting with how to combine live visuals and multiple projections with my music, so I thought Id have a go at a bit of an audio-visual jam in the studio and include some never shown before content, and some brand new studio productions having their first plays.

The internet connection in my studio isnt great so Ive recorded the session to go out from a reliable source, and Ill be online to chat to you if you have any questions and want to join for the stream at 8pm GMT Saturday 25th.

........AFTER…

That was fun, big thanks to all of you who joined for the live chat, really nice to connect with you all briefly. If youd like some more where that came from theres also a live show recording here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=owdva7V2M0o

And heres the tracklist from the lockdown stream session as promised.....sorry there were a few (unintentional) glitches in there even going the recording route, Ill see if I can get the video quality sharper for the next one too…

1
Audio: Max Cooper Playing some synths
Video: Sieve of Eratosthenes and Sacks Spiral by Dugan Hammock
2
Audio: Christian Loffler — Haul — Max Cooper Remix
Video: Repetition by Kevin McGloughlin
3
Audio: Max Cooper — Waves
Video: Waves by Kevin McGloughlin
4
Audio: Vessels — Everyone is Falling — Max Cooper Remix
Video: Symmetry by Kevin McGloughlin
5
Audio: Max Cooper and Rob Clouth — Corporeal
Video 1: Myth by Suzi Sie
Video 2: Molten Landscapes by Morgan Beringer
6
Audio: Max Cooper — Origins
Video: Origins by Rabbithole and BlackBox
7
Audio: Max Cooper — Perpetual Motion
Video: Perpetual Motion by Nick Cobby
8
Audio: Max Cooper — Order from Chaos
Video: Order from Chaos by Maxime Causeret
9
Audio: Nicolas Bougaieff — Dust — Max Cooper Remix
Video: Numb by Henning M. Lederer
10
Audio: Yorkston Thorne Khan Max Cooper remix preview more to follow on that soon
Video: Secrets, acusations and charges by Nick Cobby
11
Audio: Glassforms preview more to follow on that project v soon
Video 1: Sleeping Land by Paul Bloomfield
Video 2: Suface Divisions by Andy Lomas

And if youre interested in the background info about how the video projects came about, the ideas in there, and why it looks and sounds as it does, loads of info and all the music videos in the mini-sites for each album:

www.yearningfortheinfinite.net/
ohbs.maxcooper.net/
emergence.maxcooper.net/

And there were some questions during the live chat about production techniques and that sort of thing. I did this Reddit AMA recently which went into a lot of detail on that side of things in case of interest:

www.reddit.com/r/electronicmusic/comments/fpwfmi/hey_max_cooper_here_ama/

Thanks for having a watch/listen, and take care x

Max Cooper - Waves (official video by Kevin McGloughlin)


First single from the new album Emergence
Out Now Emergence MaxCooper.lnk.to/Emergence
Subscribe to Max Cooper: MaxCooper.lnk.to/Subscribe
Album mini-site: emergence.maxcooper.net/

This video is part of the Emergence audio/visual project, where I explored the idea of natural laws and their creation of the world around us. The early chapters of the story focus on the fundamentals of natural laws themselves, the basic principles of nature which needed to be in place before the physical universe could come into being.

Luckily for me, working on an AV project, these basic building blocks of nature tended to yield beautiful results visually — symmetries, the distribution of the primes, dimensionality and hyper-dimensional forms, and here, waves. Perhaps this is because we have some subconscious appreciation for their importance, or maybe it’s just through social conditioning and the fact that they are usually common forms because of their irreducibility.

The idea seemed like a simple one visually, so I wanted to create a simple classic synth approach musically, and find a strong retro aesthetic visually to match. Tom Hodge added some Fender Rhodes noodling for extra retro feel, and Kevin McGloughlin nailed the visual approach with a great technique for presenting waves as the product of strong moving lines in a simple colour scheme. Some of the video work reminds me of 60’s or 70’s modernist imagery, which fit right in musically.

I chose the concept of waves for part of the Emergence story, because they are a very important idea in much of our understanding of the world around us, and within us. They form the basis of light and wireless communications, and our source of energy from the sun which creates almost all plant and animal life. Our best understanding of the fundamental nature of reality at the smallest scales is purely waves, apparently. And even the process of neuronal action that produces our awareness relies on waves of charge flow created by forces which are supposedly themselves mediated by waves — the virtual photon, a massless wave (i.e. light), being the force carrier of the electromagnetic charge which shunts particles around inside your neurones to make you think. And then there’s the more familiar waves that can dump you under and make you swallow some rank sea water.

In addition to all of that, waves are also the basis of music — waves in the air, that is, sound, structured with symmetries. Much the same as with thinking about symmetry for that chapter of the Emergence story, it turns out that music shares a lot in common with our visual aesthetic preferences, and both are deeply rooted in principles of nature illuminated by science.

There are different ways in which waves can operate, and what constitutes a wave at all, with or without a medium for example. But they all seem to involve energy transfer without needing the transfer of physical mass — like you can see in the video, the mass (each particle, or a charge) moves up and down on a single axis, and the wave, and energy, is propagated through the medium by these point oscillations.
— Max

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Video by Kevin McGloughlin
vimeo.com/user2184989