SONICA : MAX COOPER
T H E M A X
FA C TO R
As the Sonica festival returns to Glasgow for another year, Stewart Smith fi nds out what to expect from Aether, the ambitious interactive opening performance by musician, scientist and producer Max Cooper
S onica, Cryptic’s award-winning festival of visual sonic arts, returns to Glasgow this autumn with a programme that ranges from the domestic environment (Yuri Suzuki’s Furniture Music, see feature overleaf), to the cosmic realm of quantum physics (Michela Pelusio’s Spacetime Helix), via ocean life and ancient forests. Scotland- based artists presenting include Heather Lander and Alex Smoke, Sue Zuki and Robbie Thompson, Lo Kindre, Kian McEvoy, and Ela Orleans. The festival also unveils a new venue, The Engine Rooms, which hosts AUSNA’s enveloping sound installation 100 Keyboards.
The festival opens with Aether, a spectacular performance from musician, scientist and producer Max Cooper and design collective Architecture Social Club. Thousands of threads will hang from the ceiling of the Tramway, catching moving points of light to form a diaphanous, constantly shifting matrix that responds in real time to Cooper’s electronic sounds. Audience members can move around the space to view the patterns from every angle, as they morph from interlocking geometric grids into a swirling cosmic vortex.
Cooper trained as a scientist, but he fi nds it diffi cult to say how his studies have infl uenced his composition and production. ‘My music is primarily an emotional expression, and the science-related part usually comes in in the structuring of those feelings. There’s always that human-machine balance when I’m working with science-related ideas and visuals.’ Audio-visual performances help bring these wider interests into Cooper’s creative process and live shows. ‘It’s hard to map data to music. We have very specifi c requirements about how sound waves need to be structured to sound musical to us. Whereas visually it’s much more open, we can use real science data and generative models based on abstract ideas to create things which many of us fi nd appealing.’ Aether was created by Satyajit Das, Regan Appleton and David Gardener as a response to Cooper’s question of how to bring the live audio-visual experience out of the distant performer-on-stage model to the audience instead. ‘It’s very different from most AV shows in this respect,’ Cooper explains. ‘You can walk around it and see a hovering three- dimensional moving image from all angles. It’s a beautiful live creation to get to play with.’ Would it be fair to say that his work isn’t about science in itself, but rather about how we as humans relate to it? ‘Yes, that’s one way of putting it,’ he responds. ‘Not all of my work is science-related. I made club music for years
before I started getting a grip on how I could bring my other interests in, and that is an ongoing process. But for what I’m mainly doing at the moment, I’d say it’s about the aesthetics of science, or put another way, how natural aesthetics make us feel. So yeah, I guess that’s about how we relate to science as people, our emotional response to seeing a deep structure of nature that we wouldn’t usually see – like the distribution of the primes, or Rule 110, or cellular morphogenesis.’ Cooper adds that his forthcoming album / installation, Yearning for the Infi nite, which features vocal contributions from Alison Moyet and Fife legend James Yorkston, is more ‘human-nature related’ using science-associated visuals set against footage of people going about their day to day lives as a means of linking human nature to underlying structures: ‘setting us in the context of the system in which we exist’. Cooper insists that there’s nothing pessimistic about it, though. ‘It’s more a matter of seeing the beauty in these natural systems in which we exist, rather than needing to get that from some other external source and denying us being part of the mechanistic world.’
Although they are separate projects, Cooper feels Aether and Yearning for the Infi nite have much in common. ‘The aesthetics of simplicity, iteration and emergence are there in both, as in almost all of my visual projects. Aether very much follows the theme of how the simplest boiled down natural structures – a line, a circle, a sine wave – can be extrapolated to create something beautiful and unexpected. In the case of Aether, it’s how these things translate to a moving, stretched- out three-dimensional point cloud, and in the case of Yearning for the Infi nite, we visualise the limits of these sorts of extrapolations when they’re allowed to continue indefi nitely on multi-fl at-screen renders.’ As for his personal Sonica highlights, Cooper mentions cabosanroque’s exploration of Catalan poet Joan Brossa and Robertina Šebjanič’s Aurelia 1+Hz proto viva generator, a sonifi cation of underwater environments. ‘They look amazing, but hopefully I’ll get to see everything and learn something new. Everything seems linked by the application of existing technologies to unusual mediums – taking what’s there and joining it together in new ways – which is exactly how I defi ne creativity.’
Aether, Tramway, Glasgow, Thu 31 Oct; part of Sonica, various venues, Glasgow, Thu 31 Oct–Mon 11 Nov, sonic-a.co.uk 1 Sep–31 Oct 2019 THE LIST 35