Max Cooper Interview

What inspired you to pursue both music and genetics? Many artists seem to discard one life path to pursue their music but you have held on to both. Did it ever seem impossible to carry both projects?

It always seems impossible! I generally swing my focus from one to the other, which means both things suffer in the end. But on the positive side, I get to combine influences which makes my music and research what they are, maybe if I only did one I would lose my creativity – I think creativity is all about drawing on novel influences.

How have your studies of science and genetics influenced your production and DJing?

It’s all about breaking things down into simpler and simpler units until you understand them, and then systematically exploring all the possibilities of combining the units to pull out useful techniques and ideas. So for DJing, this helped for learning all the fundamental scratch techniques and then learning to combine them in new ways. And productions are a lot like systems biology – you just have to explore the variables of the software and learn what it means in terms of the biology/music so that you can best translate ideas into simulations (music) or simulations into ideas (science).

Your production seems to run heavy with emotional content and story line. Can you speak on your general music production narrative and concepts?

Generally it’s about capturing a specific thought or emotion and trying to translate that into a piece of music as best I can. I find the best tracks happen when there is a clear message like this, so if I get a feeling of something that I think could work I have to start the track straight away so that it doesn’t get diluted and then lost in the translation. This means lots of late nights. As for what particular narrative or concepts are used, this is up to the listener to draw their own conclusions on – my particular concepts will be different from those which invoke a similar emotional response in another person, so I think the message of the music is transferred best when these specifics are unsaid.

What hardware, software and sample packs do you use and recommend?

Ableton Live, Absynth, Operator, Imposcar, Waves Plugins, Akai APC40.

Can you list 5-10 tips for music producers out there trying to get the cleanest and most vibrant sound in their production? What tricks have you learned that you think people could benefit from? (Eqing, stereo space, inspiration, FX, etc)/b>

Light side chain compression to add punch in the mix without an audible pumping effect is an important one. Stereo and reverbs are too – as Raw Hedroom once said – you have a box of width and depth produced by stereo widening, reverbs, and delays, and it’s your job to use these effects to fill that box as much as possible so that the track literally sounds big in terms of the space it occupies (unless you are not going for that sort of track of course). Light saturation is also a massively important thing in terms of getting things to fill the mix and make a track loud. But most important of all is learning what sounds in terms of the frequencies produced by each element, best fit together to fill a mix in a balanced manner – if you get that right everything else in terms of the sound quality is easy. Spectral analysers are a good tool to help with this, to check kick and bass frequencies are different for example, and to check each element has it’s own frequency range. This is less important for the high frequencies, as it’s a log scale, so things tend to separate much easier up in the high’s where you are looking at differences of 1000’s of Hz rather than 10’s or 100’s of Hz at the low end.

I read your press kit and your live performance setup is quite a beast. Why all the equipment? What does a Max Cooper DJ set involve and what makes it special?

I do a few different sorts of sets, from a basic DJ set up (CDJs and 1210s + Mixer) to more turntablist sets, where I have a normal set up plus extra mixer and decks for scratching and juggling etc. Then the live show incorporates the turntablist set up plus my computer and Akai APC40 so that I can play stuff live on ableton plus scratch and drop extras on top with the standard set up.

What do you think that the international dance music scene needs more of right now and what does it need less of?

More tangerines that are orange on the outside (like normal tangerines), but are blue on the inside. And less excavated head flies.

What social, political, spiritual concepts do you believe in and strive to express in your music? Do you think more EDM artists should be attempting to express these concepts through their production/DJing?

I have a lot of views on these things but I think just to try and express anything in dance music is a good thing….I think a lot of it doesn’t have a lot of expression involved…..as Underworld (I believe) once said, they got sick of writing dance music because they could just make a looped up fart and everyone would think it was great. But dance music is just that, music for dancing too, so maybe trying to put in a narrative or make it meaningful is just a mugs game when in fact people just want to dance to it and can do this best without these distractions. So no, I don’t think more artists should be trying to express concepts through their productions/DJing, but fair play to those that do.

What does the rest of 2009 hold in store for you?

Lot’s of remixes, more releases on Traum, an album – I have started this, whether or not it will be complete by the end of the year I am not sure. And also getting started back onto some science research so I can publish a new paper – I have been engulfed by music recently and need to balance it before it’s too late!

Do you have any comments about this exclusive mix for the FWD listeners?

The mix is a combination of a lot of my productions with a few of my own bootlegs and edits of other peoples work – the sort of live set I am doing at the moment.