“I’ve been enjoying a rediscovery of the merits of repetition recently, so I wanted to make something a little more grounded in loops and continuity than a lot of my other mixes of recent years – something where the value of the music can’t be found by dipping in, only by letting it wash over with time. The name of the mix is a play on the link between the function of waves as the source of musical experience as well as the apparent nature of reality at the smallest scales. The mix starts with a binaural recording from the 4D Sound system where I played different sine tones from different parts of the room. The throbbing you can hear did not come from the speakers, but from how the waves interacted inside the space – a demonstration of how waves can create. The mix needs a special mention to a couple of producers who feature twice, firstly Donato Dozzy, whose Vaporware release is so good I had to use two tracks from it, and David August, whose work I love, and who has recently remixed a track from my next EP coming later this year. There’s also a couple of new unheard tracks on there from me, including one that a lot of people have been asking about after it featured in some recent shows – a remix of a beautiful post-classical track by Frederic D. Oberland and Richard Knox.”
Duration:1.09.48
Video: Nokia N8-00 HD / Marokko Beach Essaouira
Music: Max Cooper Live — Movements Through Self Contained Space soundcloud.com/max-cooper/max-cooper-live-movements
1. Remix to be announced 1
2. Collaboration to be announced 2
3. Max Cooper — Autumn Haze (Traum) — Out Now
4. Max Cooper feat. Braids — Automaton (Fields)
5. Magic Panda — Distant Places — Max Cooper Remix (Tigerbeat6) — Out Now
6. Remix to be announced 3
7. Max Cooper feat. Braids — Pleasures (Fields)
8. Halls — Roses for the dead — Max Cooper Remix (No pain in pop)
9. Collaboration to be announced 4
10. Robert Clouth — Cloud Complex — Max Cooper Remix (Traum)
11. Nils Frahm — Peter — Max Cooper Remix (Erased Tapes)
12. To be announced 5
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
‘Volga / Bengali’ sees Anjunadeep newcomer Bona Fide team up with Anjunadeep Explorations 08 alumni M.O.S. for a double cut of exotic deep house.
A commanding pair of singles, ‘Volga’ combines ethnic plucks with a luscious arrangement of strings, whilst ‘Bengali’ lays chorused vocals across a bed of tribal percussion and all-enveloping bass.