Where did you grow up? What was your childhood like? I grew up in Belfast. It’s a beautiful place. Well, the city’s not beautiful, but generally, you’re always about ten minutes away from the countryside. The hills rise out of the sea, you have unspoiled views, so I’m definitely not a country person but I’m not a city person either. I like to get away from things and be among nature. Belfast has a good balance of that, but obviously also you have the Troubles and bombs and stuff. I used to live next door to a barracks and every day I’d see armored cars with guys with guns and stuff in big metal-plated Land Rovers with guys pointing guns out the top at everyone they went past. When I was a kid it was just normal, it didn’t have a big negative impact on me or anything. What first drew you to electronica? Electronica seems to be a wide ranging term to describe electronic music that doesn’t fit into any of the other more well-known genres. After a while listening to any electronic genre I think it’s natural to want to hear something less formulaic. I think music always needs to provide some unexpected turns to be enjoyable, and electronica is a good source of unexpectedness. How would you describe your sound? What is your primary goal when making music? What primarily defines my sound is that it’s me trying to express myself, musically. Everyone is different, so if you can find a way to express yourself you naturally sound different from other people. It’s only personal for me, it’s not just music to make people dance or anything like that. It’s me expressing the way I feel at a certain time, what I’m passionate about, and what I’m interested in. I’m trying to convert that into a musical form. I guess that’s how I would describe my sound. It is very hard to put a label on it, though because it doesn’t really fit into one particular genre. I’m also interested in different kind of genres and I’m trying to fuse it all together and don’t restrict myself to one. What are your favorite iOS music apps? Liine Lemur, Moog Music Animoog, Xewton Music Studio are the most useful iOS apps I’ve used for music. What do you think of your fan-made videos? I love them. I get a lot of enjoyment from seeing people’s new interpretations of my music and it’s great to see when they talk back to me in the same language with which I was trying to talk to them. Do you use any iOS apps to sketch ideas on the go? What I’m after is a basic studio app that I can easily sketch and edit MIDI note progressions on. Xewton Music Studio is the best I’ve found so far, but the MIDI editing is still difficult to work with. How much of your live set is actually improvised and how much is pre-planned? It depends. I basically have a few different types of live shows. It really depends on which live show I’m doing. I did a show with Tom Hodge last week, which was piano and electronics. And that one had some totally improvised sections where I was just live drumming and I did live glitch samples and stuff. He is improvising with that, you know? We never knew how it would sound like, but for my club shows, when I’m doing a live set, the improvisation has more to do with track selection. I never pre-plan what I’ll play, so I always improvise in that sense. I focus on getting the set right and joining the different pieces of music. Whereas the show with Tom Hodge is the opposite. We have a pre defined track list. And then the work is improving within the track and building it differently. So it really depends on what type of show I’m doing. You’ve been putting out huge shows the past few years with your MESH Live show at Village Underground and alongside Paul Kalkbrenner at Printworks. What do you think of the London scene since you’ve started here? It’s great! Any city this size with so many different people and ideas is a good place to play music, as you can always find the people that share your interests. People are open-minded too with the exposure they get to so much of the world. https://soundcloud.com/max-cooper/hope"I spend most of my free time trying to learn more, and it provides a constant source of excitement and inspiration. These are great feelings for channeling into creating music, but it also provides rich pickings for visual ideas and most of my projects these days have a visual component."
A Sit Down With DJ Max Cooper
Unsurprisingly for someone with a PhD in computational biology, Max Cooper is a thoughtful and articulate interview subject. Anyone who’s heard the music the man makes will likely have picked up on that too. Coming on labels like Sasha’s Last Night On Earth, FIELDS and most frequently Traum Schallplatten, it’s richly melodic and inventive stuff that balances achingly emotive and beautiful styling with a very real dance floor heft. Brainless genre music it most certainly is not.