Clash: IMS Business Report 2025 Finds Huge Growth For Club Culture
One of the key takeaways from the IMS Business Report is the continued post-pandemic growth of electronic music as an industry
Max Cooper – Signal Structure
Max Cooper never set out to be a musician.
Before the world tours, the AV shows, the labyrinthine albums, he was deep in a PhD, mapping out gene networks and staring down data sets. Music ran alongside it — late nights, DJ sets, record collecting — until the pull of sound became impossible to ignore. A former scientist turned sonic architect, Cooper’s work drifts between club culture and conceptual installation, head and heart, the physical and the imagined.
In this conversation with Metal Magazine, Cooper traces the quiet pivot from lab life to late nights, the clubs and records that shaped his early musical DNA, and how a minimal laptop setup evolved into the sprawling, hybrid playground he now calls his studio.
He talks about hardware’s stubborn magic, the overlooked power of sound, and the strange relief of letting go of control. And through it all, he comes back, again and again, to something simpler than theory or concept: the search for feeling.At the centre of it all: a quiet question about connection, and how sound might still be one of the deepest forms of it.
