Following his latest audio-visual masterwork album, On Being, Max Cooper invites a curated list of remixers to provide new interpretations, out Friday 22nd August on all digital streaming platforms.
The remix collection boasts Lone, Bredren, Turtle and Sorcery along with Mesh artists Pleizel, Odalie and Throwing Snow - a collection of meaningful expressions across the electronic spectrum.
Using a unique approach to composition in which he took inspiration from anonymous statements submitted by his audience in response to the question. "What do you want to express, which you feel you cannot in everyday life?". On Being reflects sincerely on a snapshot of the modern human psyche in all its shared experience of fragility, grief, suffering, dreams, hopes and joys.
“I hadn't realised the impact that other people's words on being would have on me” - Max Cooper
From heartbreaking to hopeful, these confessions took Cooper’s ever-evolving creative process in a new direction - with profoundly intense results. Now, he opens up in those compositions to a diverse selection of artists , each offering their own interpretations to the album’s vast subject matter. Ranging from jungle and garage to cinematic ambient, the reworks look outward from Max’s originals.
Lone takes the melancholy of ‘A Sense of Getting Closer’ and levitates it in a swarm of jungle-tinged drums and wobbly bass. On his version of the same track, Amotik gives space for the original’s delicate synths to breathe over a stripped down arrangement of rolling kicks.
For ‘My Choices Are Not My Own’, Throwing Snow flips the breaks-y intensity of the original into a 2-step cut of glistening vocals and seething noise. Turtle leans into the percussion, chopping up a 170bpm helix of drums that flutter under Taiwah’s contemplative lyrics.
In Max’s own words, “I got in touch with many of my favourite artists to put together this remixes collection, and it’s interesting hearing the collection as a whole for the first time. Much like the disparate collection of quotes reflecting our shared psyche which initially formed the music, now we also have a disparate collection of musical interpretations reflecting another shared psyche of sorts. And there’s a coherence running throughout, which seems to me a commentary on, and reaction to, where things are at. Barely an evenly spaced kick in sight, and a layer of intensity, discontent and frustration, running in parallel to beauty and playfulness. It’s a powerful collection of feelings, I hope you can find some in there which resonate with your own”.
Max Cooper is an electronic composer, multi-disciplinary artist, music label founder and former scientist who has carved out
a unique space in music and visual art.
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