Filmed at the debut Yearning for the Infinite show at the Barbican in London on 28 September. Warning: this video contains flashing images!
Max Cooper:
«It was exciting to build this show for the Barbican. It’s one of my favourite venues in the world and they encouraged me to go big. So I turned the whole space into a multi layered canvas and set out to audio visualise the infinite. I collaborated with many visual artists and academics, each chapter using a different form of infinite visual structure on which I also based the music as a score. The result was an intense live show, somewhere between classical, techno, theatre and cinema. We couldn’t capture the true 3D effect of the semi transparent screen layers on film, but Tegid [Cartwright, the director] has done a great job showing the vibe of the evening, which was pretty special. Big thanks again to the Barbican, all of the visual and musical collaborators and team who helped put it all together, and everyone who came along to make it what it was.»
The new album project is full of scores to infinite visualisations, so it needed some spacey synth noodlings to match. Its the first time Ive made a live improvised piece of music, it gives it a different feel, less precise arrangement, constant patch morphing and more flow. Something to get lost in hopefully. Myself on synths, Six Sigma on bassline, and Adam Betts on drums. I added some detailing later and the big retro snare etc, but the core synth and basslines that run throughout came from that initial jam session.
The track is called Parting Ways, and is set to a video sequence by the awesome Maxime Causeret, telling the story of creation via endless division. Youll see the references to old video projects in there too, it was one part of the new story which overlapped with some old ones.
— — — MAXIME CAUSERET:
Ive tried to start from a very simple element a box and make it split again and again in order to create more complex structures. It ends up to the universe splitting into multiverses that loops back to this box splitting and splitting again, in an infinite loop. As a funny fact, I often get crazy scales while zooming out, with a few unexpected bugs like min and max slope values in Houdini animation editor. I hope you will enjoy this animation. I have to thanks 2 collaborators that helps me on this project: Leslie Murard and Gratien Vernier.
1. Max Cooper — Sea of Sound (Traum)
2. Au Revoir Simone — Take Me As I Am — Max Cooper Remix
3. Max Cooper — River of Gold (Traum)
4. Echaskech — The Storm — Max Cooper Remix (Just Music)
5. Abe Duque
Origins is part of my new Emergence audiovisual show. It examines how everything comes from (almost) nothing — how simple laws create complex, fascinating and beautiful outcomes. Origins shows how electromagnetism — one of the four fundamental forces, helps create the types of cell structures that allow life to emerge.
What you see is water mixed with an oily ferrofluid. Because their charge properties are different, they cannot mix – each repels the other. But when forcibly mixed by mechanical or magnetic forces, the result is that spheres form of one fluid inside the other – basic cell-like structures. All living cells today exhibit this same natural property of being encased in molecules that form a barrier which repels water, and it’s possible that the first cells arose through the sorts of processes shown in the video.
The inclusion of a magnetically influenced ferrofluid isn’t needed to yield these basic cell-like spheres, but provides a great way of manipulating the fluids for the video. And it looks cool.
Origins is one chapter of the Emergence story for which I have worked with many different animators, musicians and some mathematicians to put together a full length audio and visual live performance. Each part of the story involved an interpretation of the ideas so that we could present them in a beautiful and abstracted, but still meaningful manner. I didn’t want to start from the big bang as would be the usual, but to look at more fundamental form from which everything could stem from — the structure of numbers themselves, shown via Riemann’s zeta function, the Sieve of Eratosthenes and Sacks spiral. The story then progresses through ideas of dimensionality, eventually the formation of matter and the universe, stars, planets, the beginnings of life, evolution, plants, animals, humans and all the way through to modern society, the capitalist machine and information era.
I wasn’t sure how to approach the origins of life section, and originally was asking for an evolutionary-themed competing cells video. But when I saw the first tests of Rabbit Hole’s ferrofluid work I realised that we were looking at something much more fundamental – how natural materials and forces can produce the first sorts of structures needed to initiate early life.
Director Tim Dee of Rabbit Hole adds:
Most of the footage you see is rotated 180 degrees to make the movement more striking. We experimented with several liquids to try to create dramatic movement: from a ferrous liquid made from vegetable oil, water and printer tone (which didnt work so well), to using kerosene, oleic acid and magnetised iron filings — all in a tiny tank the size of a coffee mug, with about four different magnets and an airpipe used to manipulate the liquid.
The video was filmed using a Blackmagic 4K Production camera with Nikon prime lenses to get in close. The final picture stitches up to three pieces of footage together, with all camera movement and zoom added during editing. This was our first music video, though weve worked with Max on his website and record covers before. Hope you like it!
There is also a brand new site dedicated to providing you with some new, unheard, music, mixes and remixes that wont be available from anywhere else, all for free. If youd like to receive this music you can sign up to the site at www.maxcooper.net/downloads
skeler. — N i g h t D r i v e スケラー is a mix by skeler of unreleased tracks.
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Tracklist:
0:00 Skeler — ID
2:39 Devilish Trio — Nose To The Grindstone (Skeler Remix)
5:45 Skeler — ID
7:35 Skeler — ID
9:40 DaniLeigh — No Limits (Skeler Remix)
11:50 Skeler — ID
13:00 Skeler — ID
14:46 Skeler — ID
17:17 Skeler — ID
19:50 Skeler — ID
22:25 Skeler — ID
24:15 Skeler — ID
25:45 LEA RUE — I Cant Say No (Skeler Remix)
28:14 Skeler — ID
30:38 Skeler — ID
34:05 Skeler — ID
36:37 Rihanna — Umbrella (Skeler Remix) (Ember Island Cover)
39:50 Skeler — Blue Foundation — Eyes On Fire (Skeler Remix)
43:08 Skeler — ID
47:50 Skeler — ID
51:06 Skeler — ID
52:56 Skeler — ID
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Support/Follow Skeler:
Bc — skelermusic.bandcamp.com
Fb — www.facebook.com/skelermusic/
Sc — soundcloud.com/skelermusic
Twitter — twitter.com/skelermusic
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Video By utitoyo: www.youtube.com/user/utitoyo
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Max Coopers Seething is a musical version of human intensity, complemented visually in this video by Andy Lomass presentation of the seething, unstoppable and unrelenting propagation of life.
The simulation work originates from Andy Lomas study titled cellular forms, which uses digital simulation of a simplified biological model of morphogenesis, with three-dimensional structures generated out of interconnected particles to represent cells.
Each form starts with a initial spherical cluster of cells which is incrementally developed over time by adding iterative layers of complexity to the structure. The aim is to create forms emergently: exploring generic similarities between many different shapes in nature rather than emulating any particular organism, revealing universal archetypal forms that can come from growth-like processes rather than top-down externally engineered design.
Cell division is controlled by accumulated nutrient levels. When the level in a cell exceeds a given threshold the cell divides, and various parameters control how both the parent and daughter cells re-connect to their immediate neighbours. New nutrient can be created by photons in cells hit by incident light rays. Nutrient can also be allowed to flow to adjacent cells. The simulation process is repeated over thousands of iterations and millions of particles, with each of the final structures comprising over fifty million cells.
00:04 — 04:41: Nutrient created using omni-directional diffuse light
04:41 — 05:50: Nutrient created using light from directly above growing forms
02:01 — 04:28: Blue overlay indicates regions of new cellular division
02:34 — 03:09: Magenta overlay indicates accumulated nutrient levels in each cell
03:09 — 03:39: Red overlay indicates number of photons hitting each cell
Directed By — The McGloughlin Brothers
Music and Sound Design By — Max Cooper
Animation / Camera / Edit By — The McGloughlin Brothers
Fluid Art By — Roman Hill, Thomas Blanchard
I wanted to make something huge and intense for the new live show, so I went for a project attempting to visualise the infinite and its links to us in our everyday lives. For every chapter of the story I found a different technique to approach it, in this case, the simple idea of repetition. Apply it, and we have a form of infinity. This was also a natural fit for my music, where I had a nice excuse to push the repetitive boat out even more than usual. I kept it very stripped back to focus on the idea, with slow evolution and occasional variants to maintain some melodic engagement.
Visually, I was lucky to get to work with one of my favourite artists, Kevin McGlouglin, where we told the human side of the story, our endless pursuit of growth and «progress», our duplication of built form and expanding cities, looking to an unbounded future of urban sprawl. It was an audio-visualisation encompassing the project title «Yearning for the Infinite». But despite our society-endangering issues around human consumption and sustainability, it wasnt supposed to be a doom scenario. We tried that musically and it didnt seem to fit. There was a back and forth on the ideas and their musical and visual representation, and what worked was something that for me seems more focused on the worth of our endless striving than its possible role in our downfall.
— — — KEVIN MCGLOUGHLIN:
Repetition is an attempt to convey the importance of our endless endeavours toward human development and growth amidst a chaotic and disorienting landscape.
The struggle for a fruitful future is challenging with the distractions of everyday life alongside its ever-growing technological advancements.
The hope is for humanity to strive through all of this in a meaningful and positive way.