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music
Max Cooper - Everything
Youtube
Max Cooper: My new single, Everything, is part of the Unspoken Words audio visual album project. Every chapter and piece of music is an expression of something I can't properly communicate with words, but can with music. This first single from the project is a story about us as the vessels of the outside world, and our capacity for implementing change via a heavy dose of synth chord idealism. The video project shows footage of everything contained inside us. We are aware of an outside world, but ultimately; the scenes are experienced internally, and much of what may seem hopelessly out of our control need not be so. That's the idealistic idea which is mirrored musically, at least. I started the music when I was in need of something to give me a push forward. Sometimes a high energy classic synth explosion is the recipe for the job. It created the feeling that anything seemed possible, a fresh belief with a touch of ignorance that’s essential for new ideas to emerge free from the constraining baggage of old failures. The synths seemed to carry the hope of everything I could imagine, condensed into the simple chord progression, improvised pads and layers of distortion. It was a lot of fun to work with, and spending time in that creative mindset generated lots of ideas. For the visual story I worked with my long term collaborator Nick Cobby, along with the photographer's Andrey Prokhorov and Pedro Salas. Andrey has a huge library of imagery from around the world and I wanted to try and put everything inside the minds and bodies of the people of Mexico City, where Nick is based, in order to mirror the explosion of feelings and ideas and potential I had felt from the music. The whole album was also mixed in Dolby Atmos surround sound format at String and Tins studio in London. Culum Simpson designed the spatial structure of the Atmos mix in a similarly direct manner to that of the original stereo mix and visual, with growth towards full power immersion from all sides, and an ever increasing barrage of sound from the ceiling and walls as the track develops. Lots more to come soon on the spatial design process of every track and how to hear that format of the album - sign up to the mailer if you want to have first and full access. Many thanks for having a look and a listen. Nick Cobby: Myself and Max discussed at length how to incorporate the idea of 'Everything' into a visual. With the help of Andrey Prokhorov, we had the opportunity to convey this idea by weaving together a colossal amount of stunning footage he shot from around the world. The main challenge was to find a way to combine the sheer amount of imagery and bring it all together. 'Everything' as a concept is only what we ourselves perceive so I decided to use human anatomy to project Andrey's content, merging it with representations of identity and existence. The result is a dense collage with layers of memories, dreams and experiences we peel off to reveal our consciousness. We are everything. Everything is us. For the human aspect, I worked with photographer Pedro Salas to shoot some portraits of people in and around where I live in Mexico, which is a very multicultural area for here. We shot all kinds of people, as many races and ages as we could. These portraits then were cut up and rearranged to create collages that give no precedence to any particular person. There are glimpses of the faces throughout and at one point the full portraits are briefly visible. I like the way the project started as simple portraits and ended with such an intense barrage of imagery. Technically, I pushed my machine's capabilities to the limit to incorporate so much 4k footage from Andrey. We needed so much to convey this idea. Clips upon clips. Days upon days of rendering and re-rendering. Thousands of layers were assembled, masked and then re-projected onto 3d face structures in what became a mixture of automated and manual frame by frame animation. I hope the final result reflects the intensity and energy of the music and the idea we were trying to convey.
Photographer
Visuals
