In The Studio With: Max Cooper

Purveyor of the finest cerebral electronica, Max Cooper returns to the fray with immersive and beautiful new album, Emergence. Hamish Mackintosh meets him in his studio

Max Cooper isn’t your average DJ/producer. The music that he creates (along with the concepts behind it) glitch and crackle with lofty ambitions to go further into the nature of things. As with sublime debut album, Human, Cooper’s new offering, Emergence, uses electronic music to explore the human condition not to mention stimulate the senses. A long-time explorer of the possibilities of audio-visual systems, Emergence began life as a series of collaborations with visual artists, which Cooper then furnished the music for – and what music! Max Cooper’s musical world is a joyous blend of ambient synthscapes, crackling glitches, faraway voices and haunting piano motifs. Where once Max was firmly based in the box,

Emergence sees him well and truly, well, emerge, in part, from the confines of the computer and complement his deft digital skills with some choice new analogue additions to his musical palette.

Emergence also sees Max further experiment with his penchant for binaural recording, which in laymen’s terms means… get your headphones on to enjoy even more layers to the music!

Having decamped from his previous bedroom studio to the more spacious environs of the attic,

FM met up with Max Cooper to hear more about his journey out of the box and into the neural network. Music, as the beloved Boards of Canada astutely noted, truly is maths.

FM: What’s changed since we last spoke a couple of years back for the release of your debut album, Human?

Max Cooper: “I’m in the same place as before but moved into the attic as I got a few more bits of hardware. For many years I sang the praises of what you could do with digital production. It’s expensive to buy synths so it’s taken me a few years to build up a collection. Recently I felt I’d delve further into that world. When we spoke last I think I had the Moog and the Prophet, which are modern analogue synths so I started buying some of the older gear. I got an original Juno-6 and one of the classic old Roland RE-201 Space Echos. The bottom line is that gear like the Space Echo doesn’t do that many different things but what it does do sounds beautiful. There are emulations out there but I don’t think you can ever really achieve the same sound as you can with the original hardware.”

There’s a randomness inherent in some of the old hardware isn’t there?

“Yeah, exactly… the chaos. I don’t know what it is but I think sometimes the software emulations get the general gist but maybe don’t apply it to the extreme – they’re sometimes a little conservative whereas the old hardware often misbehaves in a really beautiful way. I’ve been finding it very inspiring just running the Juno and the Moog through a load of different pedals and the Space Echo. It’s funny… I ran the Juno into the Space Echo at one point and thought, my god, it’s Boards of Canada! There’s nothing more inspiring than being reminded of all that beautiful music and that then encourages me to feel enthused about the process. When you’re really excited about using a new bit of kit then that’s half the battle won.”

The modulation available with some of the older synths and, particularly, that chorus that’s built into the Juno is a bit special…

“Yeah and the filter too. If you leave the filter on a little bit even with a really slow LFO rate and it’s just modulating the sound beautifully… Then, whenever it opens up it’s so gritty. I’ve also noticed that when there are several notes playing with a long release on them it builds into a beautiful, gritty sound that’s reminiscent of old music that was written on those synths. Messy sometimes but loads of character.

“With my digital productions I was always searching for ‘how can I introduce chaos’ into proceedings and I was always heavily reliant on Max-for-Live devices, lots of modulations and complex randomisations; setting up a system whereby there’s a probabilistic element to the drum programming and a lot of the parameters that control the soft synths. I was always seeking to set things up in a way that was ordered chaos so that it would do unexpected things and I could play around with it, render bits and edit together all the random behaviours into something coherent. That’s pretty much my production approach so, when I find a bit of hardware that can do that then it’s right up my street.”

You’re making this particular hack feel very regretful about selling his beloved Juno-60 a few years back…

“[ laughs] The guy who sold the Juno-6 to me was sad to let it go too! The thing is, with some soft synths I’ve used in the past… or even Operator, the FM synth in Ableton… if that had been a hardware synth then maybe I would’ve moved it on by now because I’ve done so many tracks with it and it’s always good to move on. Especially with something like the Juno-6, which doesn’t have a huge range of different things it can do so, I think, if you feel you’ve made a few tracks and got what you can out of it then it’s good to move on to the next thing.

“That’s very much my style in that I like to use a few things only; restrict myself to using one or two synths and really try and get as much out of them as possible. It’s taken me over ten years to build up a collection of synths and bits and pieces that isn’t as vast as others’ but I like to get as much out of things as possible and not be in the situation where you need all the latest software or synths to actually make a good piece of music.”

The sheer plethora of options we have at our fingertips for making electronic music can be a bit overwhelming can’t it?

“I think, creatively, there’s a danger when you give yourself too many options. Especially with

software… you can get drowned in it. There are so many different options and when you combine all those different options together there’s an infinite parameter space to explore! If you’re going into Max-for-Live or the like there really is limitless parameter space and you can’t operate creatively within an infinite parameter space. I find it’s a more productive way to work to say to myself that I’ll work with certain bits of gear and try and get something creative out of them rather than just having everything to hand at the same time. It’s also a balance thing too as, if you feel that you’re too restricted then you maybe do need to add something new into the mix. I think you have to add them carefully and resist the temptation to just get all the different synths and all the different plug-ins and go mad with them.” What’s the underlying concept behind your new album, Emergence? “The whole album was built around the visual show called Emergence, which I’ve been touring for some time so the project began as a collaboration with video artists as a visual story. I built a system for performing visuals and music live with Ableton, Resolume and controllers mapped to both so I can jam with the music and the visuals simultaneously. I worked with many different visual artists to create different chapters of this storyline. The next stage was actually writing the album so I could score it for the visual show. The visual show is about the idea that you can have very simple natural laws or simple systems which can give rise to really beautiful, unexpected outcomes through iteration, time and operation of these simple mechanisms. That applied to this idea that the world we live in is an emerging property of the natural laws.

“So, the show starts off by looking at simple natural laws like symmetry or the prime numbers or waves. Those fundamental natural principles then give rise to the big bang, star formations and early life in cell form. Eventually humans come along then society, the digital age, then the future. It goes through the emergent universe timeline looking at the natural laws and processes in operation at each stage and how they create this complex, bigger whole.”

You have admirably lofty ambitions for how your music should actually be heard, haven’t you?

“The binaural thing I was doing previously very much taps into the idea of immersion; it’s a way of achieving that three-dimensional immersion in a headphone listening experience. There’s a lot of binaural effects on the new album – some simulated, some real binaural recordings and snippets of sounds. In particular, the track Cyclic which came about when I heard these mad clanging noises coming from a building site so I went across to the building site and spent half a day recording the workmen hammering huge metal poles into the foundations with machines. The percussion sounds in Cyclic are mainly all the sounds from that building site. I like the sound of broken machines!”

Do you use any Logic or the like to complement Ableton?

“No. I still use Ableton but I’ve had a crash course in Pro Tools recently to work on the surroundsound project for Dolby. Ableton is definitely the one for me. I’m totally at home using it and I like the company. They’re nice people and I like the ethos of how they do things and what they put their resources into.”

Are you still prone to disappearing into the wonderful labyrinth of Max-for-Live?

“Max-for-Live is one of the main reasons I use Ableton… I still haven’t got into writing Max patches. There’s a huge database of user content and some people I know who do write Max patches send me bits and pieces and it just opens up Ableton. As I mentioned earlier, the tools in Max-forLive allow you to link things together and randomise parameters and within the track you’re working on you can build a sort of network partially random machines where, say, the release of one drum sound is linked to the decay, attack or pitch of another. Then you have a randomised LFO applied to a whole load of parameters on a synth. So, you can set up these systems where you can carefully control what’s going wrong or mad but also generate that complexity. That functionality is totally reliant on the Max-for-Live plug-in; it’s not something that comes as standard in Ableton itself.”

I think, creatively, there’s a danger when you give yourself too many options. Especially with software… you can get drowned in it

The Max-for-Live community ethos sees some people creating some incredibly useful synths and utilities for free…

“There are people out there who, I guess, are just really into making patches for Max and they’re a godsend to people like me who struggle to delve into that side of things. For the larger community who use the things they create it’s great that these people create these things.”

FM assume that editing is still a major part of your music making process?

“It is and that’s very much the time-consuming part towards the end of each piece. I generate these systems, whether with analogue gear going a bit crazy and crunching and warbling around or maybe Max-for-Live making lots of randomised parameters. So, I’ve got my basic musical structures then I’m trying to generate complexity and interesting, chaotic behaviour on top of that. Then I’ll render all that and there’s a long editing process where I can end up working with 60 or 70 tracks of audio ideas that I then have to go through one by one cutting out bits or frequency filtering them. Then it’s just the time-consuming process of going through every one, bit by bit, millisecond by millisecond, editing out stuff and moving it all around. I find that part of the process quite meditative almost as it’s sort of mindless. The tough bit is the really creative bit at the start where I’m trying to take a concept or a feeling and turn it into a musical format – that’s the hardest bit but also the most exciting.”

FM like the juxtaposition in your music of hard glitches and ambient pianos and textures. Do you have a set way of marrying those together?

“Not really; I’ve always just written music by how I feel and my instincts. I know what I like very strongly so I just set out to try and spew that out into some tangible format! I love glitch music but I also love Ambient, Classical, Techno, Folk, Drum ’n’ Bass… whatever. I’m just trying to take all these things I love and fuse them together into something that somehow works.

“Sometimes I’ll put some mad glitches on top of something and I’ll find that it doesn’t work in that context. What I’ve found, actually, is that one of the things I like best is when I have the most beautiful, sparse piano that’s really human and really relaxed then, on the other hand, I’ve got this ‘broken machine’ glitch stuff. When I combine the two extremes together it feels like the optimal combination. For me, I don’t really see the barrier between machines and humans. The more we learn about humans the more they seem to work as machines. The more human-like computers become it seems like the more animal they get. If you turn your computer on one day and it works then, as a machine, it should do the same the next day but it doesn’t always! I’ve always just seen it as a very natural fit between the machine world and the human world.”

I don’t see a barrier between machines and humans… The more human-like computers become it seems the more animal they get

It’s hard to single out any one track on

Emergence but Waves is a particularly fine example of your work… Could you maybe talk the FM readers through its evolution?

“So that one was working with a visual artist called Kevin McGloughlin. The video story is the role of waves in pre-matter; that they’re in fundamental reality and the idea that waves are really important at a fundamental level. Waves are also what make music so we can appreciate them in that sense. If we listen to music we’re appreciating structures and waves. In matching the track to the beautiful, bold visuals that Kevin created, one of the main elements that holds the track together is the Moog Minitaur, which is a tiny bass synth and actually the first analogue synth I bought in San Francisco maybe about six years ago. Over the years it’s become one of my favourite synths; it doesn’t do that many things but what it does, it does very well. “So, I used the Minitaur for the bass stabs on

Waves… they reminded me a little bit of Lusine, who is one of my favourite producers. One of the other main things I used for the track was a plug-in called Obscurium by Sugar Bytes. I was messing around with some chords I’d played from the Prophet-8 and sending MIDI from Obscurium into the Moog Sub 37 as well as using some of Obscurium’s onboard synthesis. It’s a really powerful and interesting tool… it generates really interesting and complex MIDI patterns that can feed into itself or externally. It’s got an interesting sequencer window where you can draw in all sorts of filters and MIDI patterns – it’s a very fun interface.

“There were some Max-for-Live patches I messed around with on it too as well as a plug-in called DtBlkFx (http://rekkerd.org/dtblkfx), which Rob Clark recommended to me. It’s a Fourier Transform-based, spectral plug-in that basically applies spectral effects to your audio. You can make it do some pretty mad stuff. I used that quite a lot in the making of Waves too to get some of the weird noises and percussion effects.”

Again, a lot of editing too?

“Yeah, that was a fairly heavy editing job on that track too. Making a lot of stuff and throwing away a lot of stuff. Sometimes if you throw enough shit at the wall then there will be some gems in there. There’s a lot of decision-making and you have to be able to make quick decisions about what’s good and what’s bad, I suppose. I think my instincts there have come with many years of making music and a clear understanding of, I guess, what I’m about. I can spot what I like (and don’t like) really quickly. There’s a lot of trial and error in the music making process and trying to learn what you like and dislike really well, helps. You have to be obsessed about the process and do it for however long it takes.”