Max Cooper - Dom IV
As a performance, it’s difficult to categorise – it slides between gig, clubnight and art show.
The night opens with DOM IV, a strange blend of eccentric electronic music and projections. The screens show bizarre, warped AI imagery. Textures shift seamlessly to the music. Mechanical beats warp obliquely around industrial beeps and swirls. It’s a fitting opener for Max Cooper, gently exploring some of the sounds and styles to come, but not in a way that makes it feel like old ground.
Despite a Thursday night, after the support, it seems like Max Cooper has almost packed out the entire Arts Centre. Operating within techno and IDM, Cooper blends more classical compositional approaches to those more typically heard on dance floors.
Really the main event is his audiovisual work. Since he was last in Norwich, it’s really taken a huge leap forward, it serves the music a lot better for it too. Instead of operating a 360-degree surround projection as he did in 2020, he’s now implemented a more immersive visual setup. The depth of the projections takes the entire visual element to new heights. He uses three main surfaces– a semi-transparent sheet at the front of the stage, projected onto from back of the room (occasionally catching on punter’s heads). Then another projector behind that sheet, projecting similar, sometimes identical projections onto a screen behind the DJ decks. You can just about make out Max at the helm of two laptops, between the two screens, bopping and swaying to the music. The depth created by the screen layering is entrancing, mesmerizing the crowd from the get-go. He also uses a third projector on the Arts Centre ceiling. The projections include everything from pseudo-mathematical patterns to biological cell interactions, even performance art and dancing – it’s a world tour of visual art. This translates in the music too. He doesn’t seem too afraid of blending into heavier mixes. Everything from ambient trance to house or even streaks of industrial come through in the set. The aggressive mix of Hyroglifics to tracks from his own album Yearning For the Infinite all feature throughout the 3-hour set are two great juxtaposed examples of the storm and quiet of his set.
As a performance, it’s difficult to categorise – it slides between gig, clubnight and art show. It’s somewhat reflected in the crowd’s reactions – some happy to just lean at the back and watch the performance. Others raring to move and dance in front of the hypnotic visuals. Max Cooper’s show could easily traverse a wide range of settings. That’s what makes it so good. It’s not just a DJ set. It explores whole new avenues of what music – especially dance music – can be.
