On Being

In 2022, British producer Max Cooper posed a question to his fans: “What do you want to express that you can’t in everyday life?” He left the prompt on his website for six months and, when he returned, he was astounded by the responses. “It was a huge collection of beautiful, funny, scary, and sad stories—the whole range of human emotion,” he tells Apple Music. “I knew I had to create my next album from it.” Since the release of his 2014 debut album, *Human*, Cooper’s signature has been technically ambitious electronic productions that delve deep into human feelings. With *On Being* he explores that humanity further than ever before, using his fan responses as a jumping-off point for 13 tracks of melodic, moving electronics. From the hopeful synths of “Peace Exists Here” to the thundering industrial techno of “I Exist Inside this Machine” and the choral drum ’n’ bass of “My Choices Are not My Own,” *On Being* showcases the range of Cooper’s production as much as it does the peaks and troughs of lived experience. “The record is a snapshot of our shared psyche—something to show people they’re not alone,” he says. Read on for Cooper’s in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“On Being” (with Felix Gerbelot)** “All the tracks on the album are based on the quotes that were sent to me from listeners but this is the only one that’s from my perspective, introducing the project. There was a melting pot of humanity in the database of entries and it’s all anchored in honesty. I wanted to put that into the music, which was inspired by the viola player Felix Gerbelot. He came up with these beautiful chords while we were working together on a Terry Riley project. He was just tuning up and I managed to capture it in the moment.” **“Peace Exists Here”** “The quote that inspired this track reads: ‘Life is meaningless. Nothing matters. Peace exists here. And yet the world is never-ending. I cannot catch my breath. Stress comes from the deadlines we place on ourselves.’ I see that passage being about finding peace amongst the chaos and so musically I went to my safe place, which is the Prophet-6 synth sound. It has a timbre I’ve used a lot over the years and it produces a space I can easily get lost in. It takes you away from the real world.” **“I Am in a Church in Gravesend Listening to Old Vinyl and Drinking Coffee”** “This was one of the fun quotes, which felt grounded since it’s about someone having an everyday positive experience. I wanted to make the music equally grounded for it so I recorded the sound of myself walking in the forest, with leaves crunching underfoot, as well as an old acoustic folk guitar I found in my uncle’s house in Australia. I finally used \[LA artist/producer/developer\] Dillon Bastan’s experimental Pathways device to develop the melodic contours.” **“A Sense of Getting Closer”** “The record gently brings people into the world then it ramps up, starting with this track. The full quote reads, ‘I have a sense of getting closer to something which my life depends on. I can sense it but I cannot tell if I should be excited or terrified of what’s about to happen.’ It brought to mind a particular feeling of excitement and tension that I wanted to reflect in a chord progression that constantly builds. Making the track was all about the free expression of playing around with arpeggiation and layering of chords, adding more and more until it felt full.” **“I Exist Inside this Machine” (with Aneek Thapar)** “Aneek lives close to me and helped a lot with the mixing of my *Seme* project a few years ago. He has a modular setup and we were discussing what fun things we could do with it to reflect this quote, which is all about feeling constrained by something larger than yourself. We ended up sending drums through the setup and getting these crazy industrial sounds that produced machine music full of rigidity and structure.” **“My Choices Are not My Own” (feat. Tawiah)** “\[London singer-songwriter\] Tawiah chose this quote from the database as her starting point for our collaboration, and it was one of the few ones that wasn’t anonymous. It was a poem written by May Kaspar, and I was really taken by her idea of how the pressures of society might define how we should think and live. It starts off with many layers of spoken word to convey the sense of different information streams trying to influence us, before reaching this old-school drum ’n’ bass feel that was inspired by the choral layering of Tawiah’s vocals.” **“The Sun in a Box”** “This is one of the earliest tracks I wrote and it was based on the quote ‘I want to hold the sun in a box.’ I love how playful this image is while also holding a sense of uncertainty since, if you open the box, it’ll explode! It made me think of festival sunrises after an all-nighter, and I built a hypnotic motif with loads of playful jams on the synth to reflect that sense of joy. It has a meandering feel with over 200 sounds layered up that unfurl into that explosion of brightness.” **“True Under Certain Conditions”** “I found this quote quite different from the others since it’s more technical and thought-provoking. I took it to mean how truth doesn’t seem as solid as it used to—it can shift easily if just one element changes. Musically, techno is a rigid musical structure where, if you shift one element, it changes it entirely and creates a new truth. I channeled that on the track as well as recording myself saying the word ‘true,’ which I then chopped into pieces to scatter across the composition.” **“When I Am Alone in My Thoughts. I Am Crushed” (with Aho Ssan)** “‘When I am alone in my thoughts I am crushed’ was one of the first quotes that jumped out at me from the database because it’s so intense. It’s a troubled thing to write but there is also something positive to be gained from sharing it because it makes people feel less alone. I wanted the track to be a challenging listen because of the brutal quote and so I added more and more noise and layers of the synth to vent out that feeling. \[Paris-based composer\] Aho Ssan is also one of my favorite artists and he agreed to work on it with me by layering up his own chaos and madness into the mix. There are hidden sounds of a night market in Taiwan in there, along with the sounds of machines. It’s one of the most powerful pieces on the album.” **“You Couldn’t Love Me Enough and I’ve Spent My Whole Life Making Up for It” (feat. Niels Orens)** “This quote was a ‘what the fuck?’ moment when I first read it. It conveys so much emotion in so few words and it heralds a really intense part of the album where we get deep into difficult feelings. I was working with \[Belgian producer\] Niels Orens playing motifs to align with quotes and, in the end, we came up with this bittersweet arrangement that is full of distorted feeling. It’s a hard one to describe because it’s all about the instinctual, emotional connection to those impactful words.” **“My Mind Is Slipping”** “I had a clear structural mapping for this quote, based on playing chord progressions where all the notes start to slip relative to one another until they’re tilted. It was a maddening piece to work on because building the slipping into the musical programming was a very painful process! It’s the song I struggled with most on the album but it ultimately has a message I needed to include.” **“Mother Nature Must Have a Different Plan for Me” (with Tom VR)** “This was the most difficult of all the quotes and I wasn’t sure whether I’d include it. The full quote reads, ‘I yearn for a child. Mother Nature must have a different plan for me.’ It’s such a poignant and honest thing for someone to write, so the music had to be reflective and sensitive. I was working with \[UK producer\] Tom VR and he played this beautiful chord progression as soon as I turned on the synths, which inspired the whole track. It’s really sad but also contains acceptance and hope in something greater.” **“The Missing Piece”** “This was the last track I made on the album, when I felt that there was something missing from it. I found a quote that matched that sentiment—‘I have the feeling that something is missing but I don’t know what it is’—and, after reflecting on it, I came up with this hopeful motif. This track, and the album as a whole, is also dedicated to someone I dearly miss, my manager James Palmer-Bullock, who we sadly lost at the time of writing.”