Max Cooper has been touring his bespoke audio-visual show for some time now, but this has to be one of the most unusual places he’s played: to a sold-out audience of 4,000 people in one of London’s grandest Victorian concert halls.
He came prepared, though. “For the past two years I’ve been working on how to fill this space with light and sound and stories,” he wrote on Facebook before the show, adding that it had been “designed as a 360 immersive performance.” It certainly was that – a sound and light spectacle designed to hypnotise.
All that, plus some excellent electronic music. Things kicked off with a performance from Australian DJ and artist HAAi, who performed a selection of songs from HUMANiSE – her newest synthpop-flavoured album – against a strobing, white-light backdrop.
Her sparse vocals and live remixing of her own work into strange and beautiful techno riffs was the perfect palate cleanser ahead of Cooper’s headline set, which eschewed intimacy in favour of spectacle.
Cooper himself stood on the stage with three laptops, between two huge screens: one between him and the audience, and one behind. Both were the backdrop for his visuals – which ran the gamut from intricate and mathematical to abstract and bright.
The former computational biologist has long been a proponent of audio-visual art (he even runs his own company, Mesh, dedicated to the same), and that experience was on show here. In terms of sheer sensory overload, this was it: as music played, audiences watched as the massive screen raced to keep up, displaying neon cityscapes one minute, and migrating birds the next, all of it soundtracked by Cooper’s own music.
Was it a performance? Not in the traditional sense. Cooper mainly stood behind his bank of laptops, occasionally raising his hands in salute to the audience. This wasn’t a live performance, though the songs were all his: the focus was instead on the visuals.
Things started off slow and ambient. As pencil-line sketches of babies turning into adults and vice versa flashed up on screen, followed by a pixellated rendition of a nervous system, we got tracks like Order from Chaos and a2.
As the set progressed, that became heavier and spikier. We got the squelchy Symphony in Acid, followed by Perpetual Motion and Asymptote. It was a greatest hits, a tour through his entire oeuvre – accompanied by ever more abstract visuals. Cooper’s face being formed out of staticky cobwebs. A symphony of stick men glued to their phone screens, falling down holes. Endless video of Japanese Shinto shrines.
Towards the end, things dragged; a two-hour plus runtime of looking at screens as Cooper’s music floated past proved overlong. But at least we got to hear some of his biggest hits, too: the thunderous Higher State of Consciousness, and Forgotten Places, before he closed out with On Being. It was a perfect ending to a psychedelic night, curated with mathematical precision. Knowing Cooper though, that’s not a surprise.
