MAX COOPER | LIVE REVIEW
Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Fri 22 Mar
Max Cooper’s PhD in Computational Biology was only the beginning of his exploration of the body as a complicated, practical mechanism. In his most recent album One Hundred Billion Sparks, the intricate gears and springs of the mind were laid bare in another, now as-standard, superb blasting of intelligently-designed ambient techno: base logical processes were represented on tracks such as Incompleteness and Rule 110; higher mental faculties on tracks such as Platonic and Lovesong.
The album was a narrative progression, a series of vignettes on the whirring, clicking small parts of the mind, and was never intended to be separated too far from the pictures in Cooper’s head. “That’s the way I like to work these days, every piece of music has a visual identity from the start, and I create the music and the visual story in parallel, like I’m scoring to a film which I’ll later direct,” he said to Buzz this month.
Friday’s AV display at Clwb Ifor Bach was the reunification of Sparks with its “visual identity”. Each track (remixed by Cooper) was accompanied by a striking art movie, ranging from the beautiful and abstract to a cartoon about a robot war. The videos themselves complimented the music and Cooper’s scientific pursuits; vibrant, primary shapes evolved from trippy patterns into a sea of plasma, in which white blood cells chased bacteria and scooped them up. We delved into the spinning mechanisms of a man and the pistons, pulleys, and gears working his heart; the image distorting and progressing dynamically as Cooper toyed with his magic AV devices.
The set itself was as typical of the man as it gets; the ambient Max Cooper-ness built the set up for over an hour, with more of the subdued exhibition vibe you might expect from a touted “audio-visual experience”, before finally crashing into an industrial rework. Some of the “unexpected turns” Cooper promised in his Buzz interview appeared as flecks of jungle influence as the evening rounded off to a very danceable crescendo. A properly successful change of pace for Clwb Ifor Bach and another successful experiment for Max Cooper.
words JASON MACHLAB photos SIMON AYRE