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Max Cooper announces forthcoming album “On Being”
Acclaimed musician, sound designer and creative Max Cooper reveals full details of his forthcoming album “On Being”
Following “Unspoken Words” in 2020, the new album 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 an impressive back catalogue that dates back to 2007.
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, posing deep but open questions such as “What would you like to express which you cannot in everyday life?” and “What is it like to exist inside your head?“
The goal: to understand what it is truly like to be human right now.
The result: his new album On Being, to be released in February 2025.
With On Being, Cooper aimed to probe under the synthetic surface of social media to “create a snapshot of our minds these days,” as he puts it by asking people to share anonymously what they dare not ever say publicly. The result is an emotionally raw and shockingly honest kaleidoscope of confessions, ranging from suicide contemplations to miserable marriages to simple pure loneliness, contrasting with hundreds of anonymous confessions of love and longing.
“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.
“With this I could start instead with people’s thoughts and feelings, what resonates for them, and make my own interpretations of those musically and visually, and then send those back out to everyone. It’s more of a collaborative approach to making an album, and more intense.”
Grief, hope, regret, joy, hurt and love form the basis for each 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.”
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.
“The quotes carried so much weight for me – I interpreted them with my usual musical tools, but as you can hear in the music, everything got more extreme as I dove into the depths of what everyone had to say later in the record,”
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.
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.
Max Cooper founded Mesh in 2016 as the platform to explore the intersection of music, science and art.
Max Cooper – “On Being” will be released 28th February 2025 via Mesh.
Tracklist
- Max Cooper feat. Felix Gerbelot – On Being
- Max Cooper- Peace Exists Here
- Max Cooper – I Am In A Church In Gravesend Listening To Old Vinyl And Drinking Coffee
- Max Cooper – A Sense Of Getting Closer
- Max Cooper feat. Aneek Thapar – Exist Inside This Machine
- Max Cooper feat. Tawiah, May Kaspar – My Choices Are Not My Own
- Max Cooper – The Sun In A Box
- Max Cooper – True Under Certain Conditions
- Max Cooper feat. Aho Ssan – When I Am Alone With My Thoughts. I Am Crushed
- Max Cooper feat. Niels Orens – You Couldn’t Love Me Enough And I’ve Spent My Whole Life Making Up For It
- Max Cooper – My Mind Is Slipping
- Max Cooper feat. Tom VR – Mother Nature Must Have A Different Plan For Me
- Max Cooper – The Missing Piece
- Max Cooper – It’s Up To You What You Do In The Void (Vinyl only bonus track)
