IN THE STUDIO

The UK producer invites us into his studio for a tour of his hardware synths and creative stompboxes

© Joseph Branston

The Prophet-6, Fairfield Circuitry Meet Maude and Hologram’s Microcosm at play

Over the past decade or so, British producer Max Cooper has emerged as one of our most innovative electronic musicians. Much like his peers Jon Hopkins or Floating Points, Cooper’s take on electronic music sits at the nexus point between the club, ambient and classical.

One element that makes Max Cooper’s particular strand of electronic music unique is his emphasis on the connection between visual and sonic artforms. Almost all of Cooper’s projects are linked to, or inspired by, corresponding visual works, which form the basis for his stunning multi-screen AV shows. “Usually the way I work with visuals is that I’ll start with some kind of concept that has a visual counterpart, and then I commission someone to build the visuals,” he explains. “But sometimes people will come to me with a visual idea and say, do you want to make music for this? So in those cases I’m more acting like a traditional scoring musician.”

Musically, this visually-inspired concept tends to manifest in tracks that are at once beautifully simplistic – often built on simple rising chord progressions and ambient drones – but also crammed full of intricate, unpredictable detail.

“I love loads of detail in my tracks,” he tells us. “I’ll always do these tracks where I put in more layers than I should do and get to the point where you can’t really hear another layer. But then I might use a binaural panner or a spatial audio system, which means you can have all these layers in different positions.”