"I'm delighted to announce my new album, Emergence!
A couple of years ago I decide to start touring live audio/visual shows called Emergence. The more I delved into the project, the more ideas kept coming for new video projects and music. So in the end I decided I needed to write an album to accompany the visual story, and aim towards releasing the whole thing as a surround-sound blu-ray to finish the project properly.
The album part of the project will be released in November, which you can pre-order now: http://maxcooper.lnk.to/emergence
The first track from Emergence is called Waves and it’s from fairly early on in the story when we’re still exploring the fundamentals of nature to set the stage for the physical universe to come later. I was aiming for a simple strong retro synth sort of sound with this one, to go with a bold wave visual, with quite a playful approach musically and visually as well - It’s one of the less deep tracks on the album, so a little unusual for me, but still with lots of detailing and layering of course.
I used the DSI Prophet 8 for the main chords, run through a Moogerfooger ring mod just for the drive to give it some dirt, without using the ring mod function itself. Then the bass stabs were the Moog Minitaur, which is a great little bass synth with a classic Moogy sound, and a sound that also reminded me of Lusine’s work, which I love.
Then there was a lot of semi-generative work on the effects and little noises, where I set up some synths and effects with lots of random (within controlled boundaries) variation of many parameters, so that the piece turned into a bit of seething mess, which I think had to spend many days tidying to pull it into more of a defined shape.
After that it was a lot of layering of pads to create the peak, and finally, Andy Lomas had a jam over it with a Fender Rhodes, which you can hear coming in at some points of the track to add some extra playfulness and moments of a live feel.
We're announcing tour dates and other merch very soon, so keep checking maxcooper.net and the social networks in the coming weeks!
As always, thank you for having a listen and a read. Lots more music on the way very soon!
Thanks
Max"