Max Cooper with Alex Banks – Eve

Here is the last in Max Cooper’s Quotient series. A collaboration with Alex Banks. This is Max at his techno IDM best. Driving rhythms, crushed beats, warped synths and more invention than you can shake a stick at. And yet dancey as anything.

Blurb:

Here’s Alex’s and my oral history of this track..

Alex: “The idea for ‘Eve’ came about from a short session in my studio where I sketched out some very rough 16 bar loops and sent them over to Max to play with, deliberately stopping myself from developing them too far at this stage in order to leave space the collaborative process to evolve.”

Max: “I almost un-wrote a track for this one. Alex started off with the main bulk of the ideas for the track, and I initially chopped it all back to a couple of key elements. I then experimented with some FFT effects and building some chaotic randomising manipulations of the basic elements, and sliding drum rhythms so that one drum element would slip relative to another and then back in – all an attempt to generate some movement and variation from the simple building blocks.”

Alex: “It was interesting to hear the rough ideas I had created, developed in a totally different way to how they would have had I been writing the track by myself. Inspired by the new direction the track was going in – ”

Max: “I’d made a mess. Alex helped tidy it all up and bring it enough back into line to work as a dancefloor track”

Alex: “- I layered some more percussion hits and string textures. We continued the process of sending stems back and forth, refining each others ideas as well and creating new ones until the track was ready.”

Max: “The quotient series has been a nice opportunity to experiment with new music outside of the restrictions of record labels and their need to sell product. This freedom has left me open to put out a piano solo and feedback matrix, a 10 minute ambient to drum and bass glitch remix, a track scored to a video, a one off club collab and more – all projects that I wanted to try, and am glad I did, but that wouldn’t easily fit into the usual EP/LP formats.

It’s been a sort of sketch and experiment project, much of it tied to the Emergence visual shows, where I’ve been experimenting with how I can perform music and visual in sync in a live format. “

~ by acidted on September 29, 2015.