Nathan ClareWe recently sat down with Belfast-born, now London-based multidisciplinary artist Max Cooper to discuss the year ahead, his upcoming album ‘On Being’, the fusion of all things music and science as well as some of his wider musical influences. We spoke about what’s happening with his label, Mesh, as well as his background prior to music and how it helped shape his own musical journey and more.
Max Cooper has built a colossal reputation as one of the most exciting electronic music producers over the past 18 years, carving out a distinctive space where music, science and art meet. He is renowned globally for his immersive audiovisual performances which showcase such intricate soundscapes, with his background in computational biology aiding in his curiosity to combine aspects of science, music, and art together as a means of storytelling.
Cooper has enjoyed great artistic success through constantly pushing the dial regarding his composition of electronic music along with thought-provoking visuals that create experiences that are intellectually stimulating as they are emotionally resonant. As he continues to push forward on all fronts, we got the chance to discuss the future, and his past. A list of some of his inspirations, and chats about the constantly evolving relationship between technology and music.
Hi Max, how are things? How are you feeling about the year ahead? What do you feel most excited about?
I’ve got the next album, On Being, out in a few weeks, a new live show called Lattice building on the 3DAV show with laser extrusions to the 3D imagery, a new installation with Ksawery Komputery built from the new album concept, and lots of new projects underway in the studio too. Hopefully they’ll work and it will be a good year, but with new projects there’s always some bugs and bumps to get through.
Mesh serves as a platform at the intersection of music, art, and science. What inspired its creation, and where is it heading in 2025? Additionally, could you share some insight into your upcoming On Being album that’s due to release at the end of February, as well as other things you might have planned for the platform?
I worked in sciences before music, and always had an aesthetic connection to that world. It’s full of beautiful structure. As my musical path continued I came to realise that the more of myself I could get into my projects the better, so I decided to try and fuse my loves of music, visual art and sciences together with the Mesh label. For 2025 we have a lot of strong projects from Rob Clouth, Pleizel, Jinje, Reid Willis and more, and I have my next album on the way you mentioned – On Being. I had been collecting quotes from listeners of my last album after asking them “what do you want to express which you feel you cannot in everyday life?”. I received a barrage of intense human expression of all forms, and it carried a lot of emotional weight, with which the only thing I knew to do was make music about. So the new album isn’t so scientifically focused, it’s more raw human expression.
Let’s take a step back for a minute. I first saw your live performance at AVA in Printworks in February 2023, where sound, lasers, and lights created a stunning and impressive audiovisual experience. How did you feel leading up to that show, and how has your approach to audiovisual performance evolved since?
Yeah I’ve been working with Architecture Social Club on multi surface laser / projector / light integration systems for some years, that was one iteration of which Lattice is many steps forwards. Myself and Satyajit Das from ASC met in 1999 when he started his Firefly events which I was a resident at. We used to have a 6 vinyl decks show playing techno and I’d be scratching and beatjuggling and all of that, it was called Thrash Jelly…ha… So we’ve changed things up a bit, but still looking for how we can push things forwards in electronic events.
Your work bridges electronic music and science in fascinating ways. Could you walk us through how you approach combining these fields and share how your background has shaped this journey? Has this felt like a natural progression for you, considering your educational and vast musical background and its influences?
Usually the science ideas come in with the visuals, and then I find ways to map them to the musical forms. Order from chaos was a nice one where I was working with an emergence theme, and found out I could slowly force random raindrops into a grid to create an emergent piece of music to align with the emergence of complexity themes Maxime Causeret was working with visually. I’m not interested in data visualisation for the sake of it, I want to show something that actually contains practically useful information and can reveal something about nature, and the music needs to evoke emotion to tell the story.
In a previous interview for MusicRadar Tech, a commenter mentioned some questions to which you replied to that you’d make note of. Of those questions, I felt like the ones that ask about how you transitioned to music full-time as well as the trade-off of sacrificing a conventional career path as the two most interesting ones. Could you elaborate on how these things worked out for you and how you felt during these formative periods of your life?
The transition to full-time music for me was mainly intense hours for many years. But I loved making music so I was happy to spend 12–14 hours a day on it 7 days a week, and I had that opportunity to focus on it when I finished my Post-doc, hadn’t started touring heavily yet, and could live a simple lifestyle without much outgoings. There were a lot of frustrations along that path, it was a massive struggle to get my music anywhere close to where I wanted it to be, and to be honest I still feel like that to a lesser degree. But at the start it was particularly tough, making shite track after shite track and getting knocked back at every stage. Luckily I loved the writing process, so I just focused on that and kept throwing the shite against the wall until some stuck.
In 2013, you performed on a 3D printed sound system called 4DSOUND, which was pretty cutting edge at the time. How have you viewed advancements in music technology since then and what innovations do you anticipate in the next decade, regarding 3D printing, music and tech?
4DSOUND is still cutting edge today, they were well ahead of their time in terms of the capabilities of their spatial audio software. It’s a brand name btw, not a technical term. The spatial audio revolution is still ongoing and only become widely adopted now via home cinema and hifi integration. There’s still a long way to go, but it’s looking good on that front and hopefully the many years of work by everyone involved will become more widely accessible as there’s a whole realm of spatial artistry in there for musical storytelling which hasn’t yet been widely heard. As for musical innovations in the next decade, I assume generative, user driven music will become more prevalent as bio-sensors and AI models become the norm, but I think there will always be a place for traditional musicians too, given the medium is about sharing our humanity.
Beyond your classical influences and artists like Jon Hopkins or Sigur Rós, which notable figures in dance music have influenced your sound or wider journey when it comes to performing and creating music?
Rob Clouth, Odalie, Rival Consoles, Barker, James Yorkston, Autechre, Trentemoller, Plaid, Alix Perez, Nils Frahm, Ochre, Blamstrain, Roly Porter, Nathan Fake, Steve Hauschildt, Winged Victory for the Sullen, Donato Dozzy, James Holden, Stefan Bodzin, Extrawelt, Stars of the Lid, Bjork, Leftfield, Ulrich Schnauss, Moderat, Fuckbuttons, Apparat, Synkro, Peter Van Hoesen, Kimyan Law, Reid Willis, Helios, John Tejada, Tim Hecker, Lusine!
Who or what have been your biggest techno influences? How do you feel about the current state of techno, and where do you think the genre is headed?
My traditional techno education came from my involvement in Firefly in Nottingham between 99 and 2011. It wasn’t really my sound, but I played alongside Dave Clarke, Ben Sims, Green Velvet, Jeff Mills that sort of realm of things, and it definitely left an imprint.
As for the current state, we’re back in a high bpm high energy phase, which is great but there’s not enough space around the kicks for other things so it will go back down again with more groove but a loss of pure intensity. Music is usually trade-offs like this rather than one feature being better or worse. The main thing is that we keep trying new things and finding some new gems every so often.
Photo credits: Ella Mitchell
Album artwork credits: MinJeong An @minjeongart