Max Cooper Talks 3D/AV
When Clash last caught up with Max Cooper in early 2022 to discuss the release of his seventh LP, Unspoken Words, he was busy preparing to take the album on the road. The year prior, he had become the first techno artist to perform at the Acropolis in Athens. Said performance can now be watched online and truly has to be seen to be believed.
—
—
It also, coincidentally, serves as an exciting tease for one of the many great acts on offer when Simple Things returns to Bristol for its beloved and much-missed day and night instalments on Saturday 24th February. Last held in October 2019, its return follows the reopening of Bristol Beacon in November last year, promising performances from the likes of Warmduscher, Gilla Band, Giant Swan, Spectres to name just a few.
For his headline performance in the Beacon Hall, Cooper brings his current 3D/AV show with him, which he’s been touring since November last year. An ambitious project, which sees Cooper operating entirely solo armed with any number of projectors, no one show is ever the same as he adapts and tailors every performance to the aesthetics and structure of each venue.
“With my solo shows, a lot of it is just turning up and experimenting a little bit with what can go where and what looks good, but there’s two ways of doing it. You can do it with 3D models, but for my solo shows, when it’s just me, I’m quite a fan of the DIY approach. I love projectors and I love architecture, so I love combining the two and having images moving in strange ways over surfaces and interacting with the space, using it as a canvas.”
—
—
Cooper employed a similar approach when it came to performing at the Acropolis. While he came equipped with specs and photographs for the historic monument, its limestone rock structure offered a blank canvas that was ripe for experimentation. A semi-transparent gauze screen served as a constant feature, but it was the setting itself that really informed the show.
“We had this beautiful, huge historic monument with light enough rock to project onto and be visible, so we figured we’d make that part of the show – it was just how to use the space. We’ve got loads of projectors, the system I’ve built over the years is really flexible and with all the content I’ve commissioned and the people I’ve collaborated with, I’ve got lots of content I’m able to send to different places. I’m quite comfortable with experimenting on the day and trying to figure out what can work. It’s got a bit more of a rough feel to it than when we do everything super precisely.”
That flexibility gives Cooper the ability to improvise a show on site, accommodating architectural features that he might not otherwise have anticipated at a particular venue.
“That’s actually part of the fun for me with the live shows. It’s not just the music, but can I do something visually that I hadn’t planned? I know certain bits that I want to play, but I don’t predefine things and the same goes for the visuals. I enjoy seeing what happens if I send this visual over there and this one over there or I layer them both on this surface and if it’s exciting and fun or I can hear people reacting, I’ll do more of that. I quite like that.”
Cooper is quick to acknowledge that the audio aspect of the show isn’t a traditional music performance – he isn’t playing keys and he doesn’t have live musicians on stage with him – instead he’s choreographing an audio visual performance live, akin to a DJ/VJ live hybrid.
“The live aspect for me is the idea of building a story with the architecture and the space and with the people and the sound system, taking into account all the factors. That’s my background DJing – trying to take all these things into account. The visuals have been a sort of an additional part of that, for me, which has become really important.”
With work currently underway on Cooper’s eighth studio album, he’s already considering how he can build on the foundations laid by the current live show for future performances.
“It’s always like, ‘Okay, we got to here. How do we build on that?’ Rather than ditching everything and starting again, I want to still be able to employ all these things I’ve used before: the spatial audio and the different 3D AV techniques – it’s still all in there in this mess of a few projects that I can work from, but how can we build on that?”
—
—
So how does it translate to a festival setting?
“I don’t want to always be using the gauze screen, because sometimes at festivals, it’s hard to put that up, or if there’s a lot of light pollution, it doesn’t work as well. It works really well when you can make it really dark because then it can actually become invisible when you put the image behind it, but that relies on low ambient light.”
The Beacon Hall boasts freshly refurbished acoustics overseen by acoustician Bob Essert, whose work has ensured that the space can accommodate the sonic requirements of virtually every type of music imaginable – a prospect that’s particularly exciting for electronic musicians like Cooper.
“Playing in concert halls like that, which are really carefully acoustically treated is a pleasure as a musician. I’ve had 20-30 years of DJing at dodgy clubs and the rest of it. I’ve heard every variant of dodgy sound systems and a lot of good ones as well, but playing in places like that is always a pleasure because so much thought has been put into it and, essentially, what it allows me to do is be a lot more free musically.”
—
—
While the Beacon caters to everything from sweeping orchestral movements to brash industrial electronic music, for Cooper there’s something particularly special about dedicated musical spaces when it comes to his own style of electronic music and live performance.
“There’s a reason why warehouse techno music is warehouse techno music. If you’re in a big warehouse and there’s no acoustic treatment and you slam a big kick drum through it, it’ll sound okay. It’s almost like that’s the bare minimum of rhythmical simplicity and it needs to be simple because if you start playing my music in that space, it’s going to sound crap. So what happens when you have a really beautifully acoustically treated space is suddenly you can do music that just wouldn’t work in other spaces and clubs. It opens doors to musical expression that you can’t access otherwise.”
Scheduled as the penultimate set of the day, just prior to local heroes Giant Swan taking the stage, Cooper is preparing to embrace the party spirit. So what can Simple Things attendees expect?
“If I’m playing at the end of the day and everyone’s up for a party, then let’s have a party you know? A party in a space like that is a lot of fun. That’s another factor to take into account. The space looks really beautiful, so I’ll have to come up with something special that’s designed for that space. And I don’t know exactly what that’s going to be yet, but I’ll definitely come up with something.”
Up next for Cooper is Seme, a project designed in collaboration with the Barbican, Salzburg Easter Festival and architectural designers Architecture Social Club.
“Those guys are architects, designers, artists, who have a 3D model of the space. We’re defining the positions and figuring out the lines of sight and doing really detailed design.”
His work with Architecture Social Club will also inform his visuals beyond Seme, although he’s keeping details under wraps for now.
“I guess it would be jumping the gun a bit, but it’s following the same sort of ethos in terms of how we make an audio visual show not be something that the audience sits and watches from a distance. How do we make the audience feel like they’re inside this living organism with me and that we’re sharing the space together? I guess ‘immersion’ is the word but it’s a bit overused. How do we take the experience away from the stage and make it surround people and have real depth? That’s where the next real developments will come.”
—
—
Simple Things takes place at various venues across Bristol on Saturday February 24th. Tickets are available online.
Words: Paul Weedon // @twotafkap
Photo Credit Alex Kozobolis
—
