Max Cooper and Aneek Thapar ‘I Exist Inside This Machine’ – Official Music Video

Acclaimed musician, sound designer and creative Max Cooper releases the official music video by Henning M. Lederer for ‘I Exist Inside This Machine’ taken from his forthcoming album “On Being”

Following “Unspoken Words” in 2022, the new album “On Being” is set to be released on his own Mesh label. Representing Cooper’s seventh studio album it is the latest in a vast portfolio of work and impressive back catalogue.

Powerful works of art have traditionally sprung from some source deep within an artist and, if they strike the right tone, resonate with an audience to leave a lasting mark. But what if that equation were reversed: what if an artist were to draw their inspiration from deep within their audience, and use that to reflect those ideas, emotions, hopes, fears, pains and aspirations back to us?

Over a two-year journey, the audio-visual artist and electronic innovator Max Cooper has inverted the creative process by collecting hundreds of anonymous quotes.

The new single, in collaboration with British-Asian music producer, engineer and sound designer Aneek Thapar was created from the quote submission, “I exist inside this machine for a short while. Constrained by its structure, somehow feeling that I am more, but unable to comprehend. Then I am gone”

Multi-talented Thapar has had a diverse career, including mixing a No.1 album, producing award-winning sample libraries, writing music for films and tv shows and guest lecturing at acclaimed institutions around the world.

The quote that inspired ‘I Exist Inside This Machine’ could equally refer to the biological machines we are born within, or the mechanical systems we have created that we must exist within, We are all machines ourselves, yet all must live as cogs in our capitalist machine.

Despite what we see in the maelstrom of rage in the echo chambers of society ‘On Being’ reveals that humans still have an innate need to trust one another and express communal generosity – more easily done from the safety of an anonymous portal.

Whether it is the confines of our mortal bodies, the constraints of our genetics, the oppressive demands of nine-to-five routines, or the increasingly invasive infiltrations of surveillance technology and artificial intelligence, we live inside machines. What could capture that as accurately as grinding, industrial, mechanical moans that express the inexpressible frustration we can at times feel as humans.

“I was interested in the way I interact with people for my writing process, which usually involves a one-way communication of feelings and ideas that I later find out whether they resonate with others or not,” says Cooper.

Grief, hope, regret, joy, hurt and love form the basis for each album track, taking Cooper’s ever-evolving creative process in a completely new direction – with profoundly intense results.

“Rendering the experience of being is at the core of what I do musically – but I hadn’t realised the impact that other people’s words on being would have on me until I started reading the database of thoughts,” Cooper says.

“It was like finding a secret window into everyone’s minds, and discovering amongst the chaos, pleasure and pain, the experiences that we all share at different times of our lives, and overwhelming emotions and connections that call out to be explored.”

The result is a unique work of art that demonstrates unequivocally not only the power of using music without words to express emotions, but the power of words to express what seemed to be inexpressible.

“This anonymous quote arrived on my album website after I asked “What do you want to express, which you feel you can’t in everyday life?” and went on to be the title of my latest album single with Aneek Thapar.” says Cooper.

On Being will continue to evolve as Cooper gathers more confessions to feed into this ecosystem of emotions and to create a new range of art projects and other accompanying works which hopefully will speak truthfully to humanity today – and of who we are and who we can become.

“Many thanks to all of you who submitted your thoughts as part of the project, you might find them embedded in Henning’s project – if you do find any I’d love to hear from you so I can put a face to the words I’ve been spending my last few years with.” Cooper Says.

“We had been experimenting with running drums through Aneek’s modular system, which was making all sorts of crunching industrial sounds, and it all came together with a visual representation by the great Henning M. Lederer, as an update to our original capitalist machine video 10 years ago….some of the same themes are still there, but things have definitely changed, as you’ll see.”

Max Cooper – “On Being” will be released 28th February 2025 via Mesh.