Max Cooper Interview

FINDING WORDS

Eventually, the idea came to Cooper to use the quotes as the “starting point” for a new album. “I spent a couple of years just reading through and looking for musical connections. Is there something in this quote I can do justice to musically? If I did find such a quote, I’d sit at a synth with that quote in mind, and I’d try to deliver it. Or sometimes I’d be working on a musical idea, and I’d go through the database to find a quote that really connected with that idea. Then I’d be like, ‘how do I further the music to fit that quote?’ So it was a two-way thing, but very much driven by this collection of quotes.

“Another question I asked myself was whether a quote pushed me in an interesting direction musically that I wouldn’t have arrived at otherwise. It’s another reason why I love working with quotes, visual projects, scoring, or science ideas, or whatever. It always makes me do something different than I would do otherwise. There’s never a chance of a creative block. There always are way more ideas to work with, whether it’s human input or input from nature, or science, or whatever. There’s this endless stream of beautiful structures and idea and feelings, and I love working with them.”

‘On Being’ is released on Cooper’s Mesh label, which has as its motto, “Exploring the intersection between music, art and science,” which seems apt. The artist elaborates on his process and the outcomes by giving details of some of the specific tracks on the album.

“The first piece is the title track, ‘On Being,’ and it’s based on some chords played by viola player Felix Gerbelot that I recorded during a soundcheck for a Terry Riley reworks project in Paris a few years ago, using the  DPA 4560 binaural mic I had with me. I didn’t know what it was going to be for, but it had a very particular feeling to it. This was an example of the music coming into being before the quotes. It is a really beautiful, poignant piece, that carries a lot of different emotions for me, which is why I used it as the summary of the album.

“Every other piece of music on the album is related to a specific quote, sometimes the whole quote, sometimes sections of the quote. There’s a website for the album that shows the full quotes and the context, and how the music connects to the quote. Together with Ksawery Komputery and Minjeong An, who did the album artwork, I also created a physical installation with the walls and floor covered in the quotes. You can again upload your own quote and integrate it into the system.”

Max Cooper relies on hardware synths such as the Roland Juno 6, Sequential Trigon 6, Moog One and Minotaur, and Arturia PolyBrute for inspiration.

AUSSIE ROOTS. BREAKING BARRIERS

If all this sounds unusually deep and meaningful, a quick look at Cooper’s background explains some of the philosophical, scientific and art aspects of his work, and why it sits right on the boundary between popular and art music. Max Cooper was born in 1980 in Belfast in Northern Ireland as the son of two Australian parents, and grew up during the violence there, called The Troubles.

“There was a lot of aggression and fighting between Catholics and Protestants, and every person was identified as one side or the other. But because of my Australian background, I didn’t fit on either side. When I found clubs, I was suddenly in an environment where these barriers disappeared, and people interacted in a much more free manner. That really helped me, and became an important part of my development. It gave me a love of club culture, and electronic music.

“Later I studied computational biology and did a PhD, and worked for a bit as a geneticist at University College of London. I like thinking about things – I love nature and philosophy – and I like to bring these into my music as well. For half my gigs I’m playing in concert halls or art galleries, and for the other half I do dance music gigs, sometimes turning up at 5:00 a.m. in some sweaty techno club. I very much like to integrate these two sides.

“I think there’s a lot of merit to all sides. In the past electronic music wasn’t always taken as seriously as an art form, in relation to say classical music or jazz or even rock. But in recent years, those barriers have broken down – there are more and more electronic music that it is featuring in what were traditionally classical music halls, or jazz festivals, and I enjoy presenting it to those other audiences.”

SPATIAL STUDIO

Clearly judging that it was worth leaving a financially secure high-flying science career, Cooper went full-time into music around 2010, and quickly made a name for himself. He released his first EP, ‘Conditions One’, in 2012, and his widely acclaimed debut album, ‘Human’, in 2014. He also became known for working with various permutations of spatial audio and for live shows that feature a strong visual component.

He’s performed at the Glastonbury Festival, Fuji Rock Festival, the ADE in Amsterdam, and countless other places, and, of course, set up Mesh. “I wanted to set something up that explores all the things I’m interested in, science and arts and storytelling and music. I also wanted to be free of needing to make music fit a genre for a particular record label. I wanted to direct things myself, and do audiovisual projects, and focus on the idea of making music to represent something more than music, whether it’s a quote or a visual or science idea or a painting, or whatever.”

Today, Cooper lives in south London, where he has a state of the art recording studio. “I have a 7.1.4 system. My main monitors are the Genelec One 8351B, and each has a big Genelec W371A sub underneath it. I’d say the only issue with the Genelecs is that they risk sounding too good. I love loads and loads of layers for more texture and more complexity, and then sometimes when I listen on another system, it sounds a bit too much. I also have big bass traps and panelling in my room, and because it’s also an irregularly shaped loft with different surface angles, the acoustics are pretty good.

“I started off using Cubase in 2004, and discovered Ableton a few months later, and I have been using it ever since. The earlier versions were quite simple, but they have just kept developing and developing it, which is nice. My interface is a Focusrite Scarlett 12 in and 12 out, with ADAT I/O for extra outputs to feed into another audio interface – that way I have enough channels for the spatial audio. I don’t do spatial mixes myself. For that I work with other mixers, who use Nuendo or Pro Tools. ‘On Being’ was mixed by Richard Burki in Nuendo at his Future Phonic Studios in Amsterdam.

“All my early releases were done entirely in the box, because I didn’t have money for synths. I bought my first synth in 2010, the Moog Minotaur. I love it. Over the years, I have kept buying synths and pedals. I love having lots of devices everywhere that I can put my hands on. They each have their own character. So I now have lots of synths in one part of my studio, and my desk is full of desk synths and pedals.

“My main sound sources today are the Sequential Prophet 6 and 8, and the Novation Summit. I also have a Roland Juno 6, a Sequential Trigon 6, a Moog One and Minotaur, and an Arturia PolyBrute. For treatments I have many boxes on my desk, like the WMD Geiger Counter, Moogerfooger, Chase Bliss Dark World reverb, Chase Bliss Generation Loss, Fairfield Circuitry Meet Maude analogue delay, Strymon Delay, Chroma Console Multi-Effector, Hologram Electronics Microcosm, and more.”

HARDWARE SYNTHS FOR TEXTURE

According to Cooper, the hardware in his studio forms the bedrock of his musical process. “I’d say that 90% of the sounds on the album come from hardware synths. It’s a culturally ingrained thing, having grown up listening to Pink Floyd and Radiohead and classic ’80s film scores. When I play these hardware synths, they have an inherent association of quality for me. I can get beautiful resonant overtones out of them that I just can’t achieve with software. I play these synths badly, but playing gives me a feeling of direct expression. I usually run the synths through five to 10 different pedals. And then there’s yet more processing in the box. I do lots of spectral processing and granular processing and all the rest of it.

“So my first step in creating music tends to be out of box, just playing the synths, trying to get some basic feelings down. Chord progressions are usually at the core, they allow me to deliver the emotions. In general I like accessible chord progressions and melodic structures. My parents were really into classical music, and my mom was a music teacher. I was always surrounded by classical music. That’s why I’m a sucker for a beautiful chord progression. I’m always searching for that harmonic world that captures the feeling I’m after. Once I’ve got that, I live to improvise over it.

“I also have big signal chains in Ableton. I use Max for Live, predominantly for the modulation thing, which has now been standardised, which is great. I love setting up synths that wander around a bit, which can make the timbre really expressive. I like that organic feel where you’re not quite in control of things. It’s a semi-generative approach. If I want simple low-frequency elements, I’ll often use Operator, the FM synth in Ableton. Hardware synths are not so good at delivering a really clean sub-bass signal – they’re always wandering around a bit, so instead I use the Operator. If 90% of my sounds come from hardware synths, then about 10% are from Ableton synths and other soft synths, like Folds by Void and Vista, Sonic Charge’s Synplant 2, and so on.”

STUFF AT THE WALL

Unsurprisingly, Cooper uses some visual art analogies to further describe his creative process. “I have a print of a Jackson Pollock painting here. Throwing paint at the wall is my process. I have an idea, and all the synths are turned on and everything’s happening at the same time. I’m tweaking all the knobs and everything. There’s absolute chaos. It doesn’t sound good. It sounds terrible. Then I slowly chip away, taking away bits, sculpting to get to a form. That’s why I often say I’m more of a sculptor. That said, my arrangements still end up with 200 layers of different sounds!

“In electronic music timbre is dominant. Timbre became a fully-fledged member of the musical structure. Often there’s no harmony and no melody. Rhythmically, techno can be really simple. But what you have is a vibe, a feeling that comes from the timbre. While I like a beautiful chord progression and simple melodic forms, a lot of the interest comes from the texture. I love the micro detailing, the micro rhythms and the timbre side, with lots of unusual electronic processing and unusual synthesis techniques that have a constantly moving timbre.

“Minimalist classical composers in the past like Philip Glass didn’t realise they were preempting a lot of how electronic music can be structured. It’s the challenge of how you can make the simplest possible musical form interesting. How can you take something that maybe on first glance seems not interesting, but then put subtle modulations and subtle ideas in there that do make it interesting. The idea of looping, for example. That’s very much the ethos of techno music and a lot of electronic music and something I still very much have on board.”