Max Cooper’s top 10 brain melting music videos

Music

The visual has always played a central role in Max Cooper‘s work.

The DJ, producer and visual artist marries different creative disciplines and his passion and background in science with intricate, melodic strains of techno and electronica.

This has formed the basis installations, immersive experiences and live audio visual performances, that have explored the realms of sensory immersion, including experimenting with 4D sound and 360 AV experiences.

This mirrors the philosophy behind his label and mix series, Mesh. The platform has worked with artists who merge the worlds of arts and science, including Rob Clouth, Alex Banks and Llyr, as well as many of Max’s own releases, including his latest long player, Unspoken Words.

Below he picks out some of his favourite audio visual collaborations, from hand-painted visuals to short film scores and mind warping code art, prepare to get your brains melted…

Speaking about the videos, Max explains: “I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of amazing visual artists, and I’ve pushed for some strange stories and outcomes. We usually start from reasonable places but often fall into holes of beautiful abstraction, here are some of my favourites in non-ranked order.”

Max Cooper plays Junction 2 on 18th/19th June.

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Audio-Visual Junction 2 Max Cooper

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Repetition with Kevin McGloughlin

I was looking for aesthetics of the infinite here, and how to present our drive towards consumption of everything. Kevin created these mind blowing repetitive structures from our built environment and I ditched the original soundtrack and reworked it to his visual design. Sometimes the visual has to come first.

Repetition with Kevin McGloughlin

I was looking for aesthetics of the infinite here, and how to present our drive towards consumption of everything. Kevin created these mind blowing repetitive structures from our built environment and I ditched the original soundtrack and reworked it to his visual design. Sometimes the visual has to come first.
Exotic Contents with Xander Steenbrugge

For my latest Unspoken Words LP I wanted to visualise the incomprehensible ramblings of Wittgenstein about the difficulties of using language to tackle deep understanding. Xander built an AI system to convert the writings into moving image, with full reality melting effect.
Circular with Paraic McGloughlin

Mind blowing all round from Páraic McGloughlin. It’s all real, painted circles, every one, no CGI here. Just huge, and tiny and everything between, circles, strewn around the Irish industrial-scape, and turned into a drone-led story of our circular madness. Starring Páraic himself as the circling man. And it just won a Webby for best experimental short, congrats Páraic!
Contour with Wow Studio

I had the pleasure of scoring to this short film by Wow Studio Tokyo. The proponent falls into a fully brain melting otherworld to beautiful visual effect. I love the moments of comedy too as he gets angry about his situation in the underworld and has a little tantrum.
Aleph2 with Martin Krzywinski

I challenged bioinformatician and code artist Martin Krzywinski to represent Georg Cantor’s ideas of transfinite numbers here. We see an authentic visual representation of how you can build sets of numbers bigger than the infinity we can count to with our everyday numbers, and prove that these infinities bigger than infinity can’t fit into the smaller infinities. It needs a read through of the description to link the ideas to the on screen meltings.
Void with Jessica In

Full brain melt here from Jessica In, warping our eyeballs with code art. We were trying to present the void, and I had been clanging huge Gormley sculptures (with permission) to capture their resonance which the music was built around, eventually going techno bang territory of course.
Swarm with The McGloughlin Brothers

This one blew my mind when I first saw it, with the McGloughlin Brothers at it again. It arrived with me as a more or less finished visual project, which I needed to try and sync to musically. I tried to link the scene barrage to an equally dense audio barrage with a growing intensity to match as we the humans swarm the planet and probably wreck everything.
Symphony in Acid with Ksawery Komputery

A totally fresh visual approach here, but one that turned out equally as brain melting. The intense effect for me, coming from the strange experience of trying to take in the language barrage from Wittgenstein, back again trying to make sense of things which don’t make sense, synced millisecond to millisecond to rigid percussion, acid lines and orchestral synths. Ksawery also built an interactive website version where you can put your own image inside the project. All built in HTML, mega work from Ksawery.
Leaving This Place with Jazer Giles

A biologically inspired Physarum algorithm battles it out with a mechanically minded pixel sorting algorithm here. The battle field taking us on a journey of emergence as simple rules yield beautiful order and chaos.
Everything with Nick Cobby

And to finish, “please put everything that there is inside us” for final brain melting effect. That was my request to long term collaborator Nick Cobby as the people of Mexico City became host to our entire existence with a musical soundtrack aimed at being equally as jammed with feeling and potential.