Sound, science and structure: how Max Cooper unravels the cosmosIt’s a Tuesday night in April and the Royal Albert Hall is humming with quiet anticipation. The storied venue fills with concert-goers, and its famed crimson curtains begin closing around the circle.
A glance around the hall would give you little insight into Max Cooper, who’s about to emerge onto its 155-year-old stage. There are quiet university students in trios, parents in their 40s with their children, artsy couples in their retirement years, techno fashionistas in all-black, young couples, straight and queer, cosying up, lanky dudes wearing Aphex Twin t-shirts, and more besides.
Max Cooper on the MusicTech Cover. Image: Ed Miles for MusicTech
As the lights dim at 9pm, Cooper steps onto the stage between two projector screens. This concert hall has hosted iconic performances by Hans Zimmer, Jimi Hendrix, and the BBC Proms. Tonight, it witnesses a groundbreaking 360-degree immersive audiovisual performance that the esteemed venue is yet to see from an electronic music act. Standing solo onstage, Cooper is just barely visible behind a translucent screen and the haze of a smoke machine as he pilots a cockpit of laptops and synths, while hand-sketched animation of an infant’s first moments project onto the screen. Max Cooper’s cerebral, intense, challenging audiovisual phenomenon has begun.
“It’s funny. The more time has gone on, the more the audience has varied,” Cooper tells MusicTech a few days after the show. The Belfast-born producer and computational biology PhD released his debut EP in 2007, and has been bridging electronic music with scientific ideas from fields such as genetics and physiology ever since.
Cooper’s music is electronic by definition, but his show and oeuvre span various styles and genres. There are house-y, techno-esque moments that are impossible not to bop your head to, but Cooper also builds immense, sometimes dissonant arrangements of rich supersaw synthesizers that, depending on his intent, can be harsh and dissonant or warm and euphoric. “I came from years of going to parties — raving and being in that electronic scene — but I’ve ended up in this somewhat like techie-art scene, rather than straight-up dance music,” he explains, sitting on the sofa in his home studio.
Image: Ed Miles for MusicTech
Over the past decade, Cooper has played the likes of Berlin’s Berghain, London’s Barbican Centre, Carlisle Church in Belfast and at Amsterdam Dance Event, finessing his symphony of surround sound, live performance and projected visuals along the way. And at the Royal Albert Hall, his live show reached its most ambitious form yet.
“I did worry with some of the intense parts,” he says, smirking. “I worried about some of the audiences coming for a nice sit-down show at the Royal Albert Hall, expecting a classical concert, and getting this really brutal [sound]. But they seemed to deal with it, and presumably it’s interesting for them even though they’re not used to that sort of thing.”
What does a typical Max Cooper fan look like in 2026? Cooper isn’t sure at first, but offers that he appeals to “curious people”. In the coming months, he will be performing a modified version of the Royal Albert Hall show across Europe, playing tracks mostly from his upcoming album Feeling Is Structure and his 2025 record, On Being. Many more of these “curious people” who attend these sets will be awed by the convergence of intricate visuals, innovative custom-made tech, and immersive music. Above all, Cooper hopes the shows elicit deeper rumination on the human condition.
“It’s not just about going and having a dance and seeing some crazy visuals. Every chapter is full of ideas, and the whole show is built around ideas, and there’s a lot of storytelling in there,” he says. It’s food for thought intended for someone who’s “curious about who we are, and what we are and what we’re doing here, and how our experience of life relates to the systems we live in”.
“The stronger the feeling or the idea, the better chance that it’s actually going to turn into something”
Cooper’s grandiose ideas begin in his modest loft conversion in South London. When MusicTech first meets him in March, he’s putting the final touches on an upcoming track, Obsessive Compulsive Order, a highlight of the Royal Albert Hall show. The Ableton Live session is over 10 minutes long with over 250 channels of audio, an array of tiny samples scattered across the project. The thought process was “‘What happens if I just keep on editing and throwing more and more layers into the project?’” he explains.
Cooper’s desk is cluttered with effects pedals, MIDI controllers, and even an unreleased synth, the volcanic Genki Katla. He stands in the corner of the room in front of his analogue synths — a Moog One, Arturia PolyBrute and Roland Juno-106 — as the visuals from his live show project onto him, MusicTech’s photographer snapping away. In the opposite corner of the room is a chessboard and a bookcase stacked with titles on math, music, sound and science (Robert Macfarlane’s Is A River Alive? and Tom Mustill’s How To Speak Whale seem to be on rotation right now).
Image: Ed Miles for MusicTech
Despite the enviable gear, Cooper’s home studio isn’t so different from that of a hobbyist or amateur music producer. What’s clear, however, is that he thinks very deeply in this room, conjuring heady ideas and mapping out stories long before he even opens his desktop.
“I spend a lot of time reading and trying to learn about scientific ideas and natural aesthetics, like the forest floor and, I don’t know, the structure of the digits of pi,” says Cooper. “Thinking about those things and how I can tell a story with those sorts of ideas, and how I can bring scientific ideas into the work.”
The producer doesn’t start making music for any album or project until he has an idea. It’s not always as highbrow as the digits of pi — it could simply be a desire to express the emotions Cooper feels after watching a particularly moving film, he says. But he’s adamant that he doesn’t begin noodling on a synth or in a DAW until he’s inspired by a goal. “I need to have some idea of what I’m aiming for, some sort of strong feeling. The stronger the feeling or the idea, the better chance that it’s actually going to turn into something.”
Image: Ed Miles for MusicTech
Pattern Index, another track in the upcoming album Feeling Is Structure, was less about a feeling and more about exploring tools. “I was like, ‘Okay, I want to use loads of different pattern generators,’” he says, referencing Alexander Randon’s iOS app, Fugue Machine, as his original inspiration. “I wanted to throw patterns on top of patterns on top of patterns and see what happens.”
Meanwhile, Crystallis, a complex track riddled with layers of synth parts, was made with the Royal Albert Hall show in mind. “Crystallis is this metamorphosis idea,” Cooper says, describing visuals that center on the network of a cell – “all these growing pieces and reorganising” – as he plays the synths live. “They’re all a bit chaotic, but then it all comes together into this coherent harmonic structure.”
Structures are a running theme throughout both the new album and audiovisual show. Cooper says that the two main ideas he tries to convey in his work are how scientific structures enter our everyday lives in nature and in architecture, and “the hard problem of consciousness; the human perspective of looking at these [natural] structures”.
“There are a lot of brutal things going on. But then there’s also hope”
Cooper also says his music is “always a reflection of what’s happening” in the world. “There are a lot of brutal things going on,” he adds. “But then there’s also hope… I always want to try and present a positive message, despite tackling some of these negative ideas as part of the process.”
Translating all of this into a travelling live show is no small feat, particularly at the scale that Cooper has devised, with seamless transitions between chapters, themes and genres as mesmerising visuals, created in collaboration with independent animators and designers, play in sync with the music. Cooper’s controlling it all live, triggering sounds and video, a triple-laptop setup, MIDI controllers, and a few effects pedals. Although much of the material is premade, there’s ample room for error. He lets on that, on the night of the Albert Hall show, not everything went to plan — but he seems to be the only one who knows what.
Image: Ed Miles for MusicTech
“With shows like that, there’s so much new software, custom systems, and you test everything as much as you can, but it’s never quite the same as being in the actual venue on the day,” he says. “Nine different visual feeds were flying around the room, lots of signals going to front of house for the lights… A lot is going on, and you never know which bit is gonna fail or something.” Still, he’s relieved that the show, arguably the biggest of his career, went off without a hitch.
Watching the show, I noticed that Cooper’s explorations of nature and consciousness are almost a cheat code to inspiration. Instead of hoping to stumble upon motivation or wait for an idea to strike, we can look at seemingly mundane things a little deeper to stimulate creativity. Leaving the Royal Albert Hall, I heard Max Cooper fans talking about his music, but also life and the universe. This eclectic mix of people, bonding over Cooper’s musical structures, fleetingly became a structure unto themselves.
Max Cooper’s album Feeling Is Structure is out May 8. His UK live album tour begins May 14.
Words: Sam Willings
Photography: Ed Miles
The post Sound, science and structure: how Max Cooper unravels the cosmos appeared first on MusicTech.

Amazon’s new podcast strategy: Monetize everythingAmazon's podcasting business seems to have transformed over the past six months.

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Freeze Moving Tools with a Stroboscopic Camera
If you take a video of a spinning wheel, you’ll probably notice that the spokes appear to turn more slowly than the wheel is actually rotating, and sometimes in the wrong direction. This is caused by a near match in the frame rate of the camera and the rate of rotation of the wheel – each time the camera captures a frame, the wheel has rotated a spoke into nearly the same position as in the last frame. If you time the exposures carefully, as [Excessive Overkill] did in his latest video, this effect can seemingly freeze moving objects, such as a fan or saw blade.
Most cameras only allow relatively coarse, fixed adjustments to frame rate, making it difficult to synchronize the shutter to an object’s motion. To get around this, [Excessive Overkill] used an industrial camera (previously used in this aimbot), which has fine frame rate control and external triggering. He connected the external trigger to a laser sensor, which detects a piece of retroreflective tape every time it passes by (for example, on one blade of a fan). When the laser sensor sends a signal, it also triggers a powerful LED flash. The flash is so powerful that dark materials create a hum when exposed to it, as pulses quickly heat the material, but each pulse is also so brief that the flash board doesn’t require any cooling.

Even to the naked eye, these stroboscopic pulses make rotating objects seem to stand still – an effect which made [Excessive Overkill] extra cautious when working around a lathe. When using a suitably long exposure time to avoid rolling-shutter distortion, the effect worked even using a normal camera without frame-rate matching. [Excessive Overkill] took videos of debris flying away from a seemingly motionless bandsaw, milling machine, chop saw, and jigsaw, though it was harder to freeze the rotation of a weed trimmer and a drone.
We’ve seen this effect used to freeze motion a few times before, both for art and for entertainment. If you’d like to recreate it, check out this high-speed LED flash.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip!

Jun Murakami TestToneTestTone is a very simple test signal generator plugin that lets you quickly send out the signal you need — sine waves and pink noise — with adjustable frequency and level. It is handy for setting up gear, calibrating monitoring systems, and various audio checks. Available in VST3, AU, AAX, LV2 and CLAP formats for macOS, Windows and Linux. Free and open source (MIT License). I have created a demo site as a web application that runs in your browser, so please feel free to try it out. https://testtone-demo.web.app/ Read More

Anthropic created a test marketplace for agent-on-agent commerceIn a recent experiment, Anthropic created a classified marketplace where AI agents represented both buyers and sellers, striking real deals for real goods and real money.

2026 Green Powered Challenge: Ventilate Your Way To Power!Have you ever looked out across the rooftops of a city and idly gazed at the infrastructure that remains unseen from the street? It seems [varunsontakke80] has, because here’s their project, harvesting energy from the rotation of a rooftop ventilator.
The build is a relatively straightforward one, with a pair of disks with magnets attached being mounted on the ventilator shaft inside its dome. A third disk sits between them and is stationary, with a set of coils in which the magnets induce current as they move. A rectifier and charge circuit completes the picture.
This appears to be part of a college project, but despite searching, we can’t find any measure of how much power this thing generates. We’d be concerned that it might reduce the efficiency of the ventilator somewhat. There will be an inevitable tradeoff as power is harvested. Still, it’s a neat use of a ubiquitous piece of hardware, and we like it for that.
This hack is part of our 2026 Green Powered Challenge. You’ve got time to get your own entry in, so get a move on!

Bitcoiners cast doubt on the US military's understanding of the networkBitcoin advocate Matthew Kratter said US Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo's Senate testimony on Tuesday sounded like it was written by an "intern."

Kulshan Studios Rivet Industrial Soundset for Roland JP-8080 & JP-8000 & JE-808650 gritty Industrial dual-layer performances, compatible with the Roland JP-8000 and JP-8080 hardware synths. This soundbank is 100% Industrial-oriented, which means no weird brass, pianos, or FX. The sounds in Rivet were referenced against classic and modern tunes of the 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s. So this soundset is designed to fully exploit the JP's iconic SuperSaw oscillator, gritty distortion, Ring Mod, Cross-Mod, and virtual analog sound engine to their fullest potential. Performances in Rivet are based on sounds by the likes of Rammstein, Deathstars, Combichrist, White Zombie, Motionless In White, OOMPH!, Faderhead, Studio-X, Front 242, Rob Zombie, Perturbator, Godflesh, Skinny Puppy, Grendel, Extinction Front, Noisuf-X and many many more. And to cap off the bank some slots were set to INIT, so you have room to write and store your own sounds without overwriting any existing presets. Only 3rd party FX used in the demo was Virus TI2 reverb, on the leads, pads, and plucks. Sounds in this preset pack are suitable for the Industrial Rock, Industrial Metal, EBM, and Aggrotech genres, and are organized by category into Leads, Plucks, Pads, and Basses, for quick reference. All performances are royalty-free and delivered instantly via email as a 24-hour download link. Requirements: Roland JP-8000 or JP-8080 synthesizer. Also compatible with Adam Szabo Airwave, The Usual Suspects JE-8086, DiscoDSP Retromulator, DiscoDSP Corona VSTi using included .syx file, and Arturia Jup-8000 V VSTi using included split Performance files. Read More

NEP at Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro, NCWeb: robertlesterfolsom.comContact: dshaw@baselinemusic.comPlayers: Nep, vocals; Tyler Pons, drums; Sophia Damiani, bass; Jake Sonderman, guitar

Grab your slide rules: Albert Einstein almost had it right, but the real equation on display at Cat’s Cradle was E = NEP².

That proof arrived in the form of NEP (yes, that’s really her name)—a shadow-boxing indie-pop artist who brought a cocktail of swagger, nervous laughter, and Daytona Beach daydreams to the adoring Back Room crowd.

NEP burst onto the stage with a quick four-song salvo: “Daytona,” “Fender,” “Lovelace,” and “Milktown,” followed by the brisk pop flash of “Rocket Ship.” None of it calmed the room. If anything, the next stretch detonated the place: “Teddy,” “Biketoberfest,” “All Around Beauty,” and “Soundtrack” spilled out in a sugar rush of jangling guitars and nervous giggles.

The crowd surged toward the stage in what became a kind of musical cyclone. The quartet itself looked almost comically small against the swell of bodies pressed forward—NEP, her guitarist, and drummer hovering around the five-foot mark, while the bass player stood like a benevolent giant beside them.

Add NEP’s constant giggle—somewhere between nervous energy and mischievous charm—and the whole affair began to resemble a cinematic “escape from the kids’ table at Thanksgiving.”

The guitar work was simple and unadorned—almost stubbornly so—but it carried a kind of innocence that fit the material. The grooves were uncomplicated, the structures tidy, and the melodies had the breezy, slightly sunburned feel of songs written somewhere between a dorm room and a beach parking lot.

At times, the silliness threatened to overwhelm the music. There were genuinely lovely musical moments that got sliced apart by NEP’s constant asides and laughter. The vibe in the room became so beach-soaked you could almost smell the Coppertone and feel sand under your feet. The sugary, slightly smug Hello Kitty delivery sometimes obscured the delicate little juxtapositions the band—competent if understated—was putting together.

Mid-set, the groove settled into something like autopilot before reanimating with “I Close My Eyes,” “Florida Girl,” and the crowd favorite “Pup.” Without a dominant soloist or any real instrumental grandstanding, the evening became less about virtuosity and more about atmosphere: a blend of sonic melancholy and occasional Beach Blanket Bingo chaos.

The songwriting itself showed care. Songs were thoughtfully paced and clearly diaristic. There may not yet be an obvious hit single lurking in the catalog, but a certain gravitational pull—something about Daytona, about leaving and remembering—kept the set moving forward.

That Florida lineage occasionally bubbled at the surface. The warm embers of Tom Petty and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers flickered here and there, and the ghost of Southern guitar traditions that ultimately fed into The Allman Brothers Band hovered around the edges of the sound.

Elsewhere you could hear faint splashes of quirky new-wave DNA—moments that hinted at the playful pop instincts of Bow Wow Wow and the bright theatricality later embraced by Culture Club—another clue to the mixing bowl of beach culture, pop instinct, and youthful irreverence that NEP seems to inhabit. The post NEP at Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro, NC first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

MNTRA releases FLTRS-LE, a FREE Roland Jupiter-6 filter plugin
MNTRA has released FLTRS-LE, a free filter plugin based on the Roland Jupiter-6 filter circuit. FLTRS-LE is a trimmed-down version of the developer’s full FLTRS plugin, which costs $49 during the launch sale (regular price $79) and packs 37 analog circuits and experimental physics engines. The filter we get in the freebie is called EUROPA-6, [...]
View post: MNTRA releases FLTRS-LE, a FREE Roland Jupiter-6 filter plugin

Brainworx introduce bx_tonebox Aimed at obvious, creative processing rather than subtle shaping duties, bx_tonebox comprises six modules that can be freely reordered and offer a mixture of compression, saturation, filtering, noise and more. 

80s KIDS at The Virgil, Los Angeles, CAIn the world of independent artists, there are those whose musical aesthetics evolve gradually, while a rare few create rare transformations that feel almost cinematic—where everything that came before suddenly clicks into a vivid, fully realized expression. Watching Shannon Curtis confidently strut onto the stage at The Virgil as one half of 80s Kids, it’s impossible not to think back to a much earlier version of her: seated behind a keyboard at Molly Malone’s in 2009, delivering the intimate, heartfelt songs of I Play the Piano and Sing Love Songs with grace, warmth and a quietly captivating emotional pull. That artist is still very much present. But what she’s become, alongside her husband, producer and creative co-conspirator Jamie Hill, is something far more expansive, theatrical and electrifying.

What Curtis and Hill have built with 80s Kids isn’t simply a nostalgic cover project. It’s an immersive, vibrant and intricately woven aesthetic experience—a retro radio broadcast, underground synth club and deeply personal time capsule. From the moment fans entered the venue, the world was established: purple-lit ambience, a neon logo, a wall for photos, merch tables stacked with cassettes and vinyl, and the brilliantly conceived “80s Kids Radio” playing over the speakers—complete with faux ads and an over-caffeinated DJ named Ronny Rocket hyping the cultural breakthroughs of 1985 with just enough ironic hindsight to make it both hilarious and subtly dark.

This level of detail speaks to the duo’s long-standing DIY ethos. As pioneers of the modern house concert movement, they’ve spent over a decade redefining what independent artists can be—building a sustainable, community-driven career outside traditional industry structures, releasing albums at a remarkable pace, and cultivating a fiercely loyal audience through their Misfit Stars ecosystem. That same spirit of independence and innovation fuels 80s Kids, which began almost accidentally during a pause between original album cycles and quickly evolved into a full-fledged band vibe, complete with two releases (80s Kids and the just released 80s Kids 2) and a touring identity all its own.

But it’s onstage where the concept completely ignites.

Curtis appears in a striking, high-voltage look that channels the raw energy of an underground ‘80s new wave club—sheer black mesh, high-waisted shorts, fishnets, over-the-knee boots, fingerless gloves, her silver-gray hair loose and electric under saturated pink and purple lights. Gone is the seated singer-songwriter; in her place is a commanding, kinetic performer who stalks the stage, dances between vocal lines, and radiates a fierce, unapologetic presence. Part Pat Benatar grit, part Berlin-era cool, she embodies the era without ever feeling like an impersonation.

Alongside her, Hill remains mostly silent but absolutely essential, triggering meticulously crafted synth arrangements via a Roland controller and custom-programmed soft synths that recreate the original sonic architecture of each track with stunning precision. And that’s one of the show’s most refreshing choices: there’s no ironic reinterpretation, no attempt to “update” the songs. Instead, Hill faithfully rebuilds them—allowing Curtis’ powerhouse voice, drenched in reverb and heartfelt intensity, to step into and often elevate the original performances.

The set leans heavily into British and European synth-pop—a-ha, Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, OMD, New Order, Yazoo—with only a few American detours, including a crowd-erupting “Dancing in the Dark” and a torchy, deeply felt take on Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away.” From the opening pulse of “Take on Me,” Curtis commands the room with boundless energy, hitting every soaring high note while channeling the wide-eyed exuberance of her younger self discovering this music for the first time.

One of the night’s most unexpected highlights is 80s Kids’ fiery rendition of Sheena Easton’s “Strut,” a track notably absent from the 80s Kids albums but perfectly suited to Curtis’ commanding stage presence. Leaning into the song’s sly, confrontational edge, she channels its proto-feminist spirit with a knowing wink—transforming what once felt like a playful ‘80s pushback against objectification into something that resonates even more sharply in a post-#MeToo cultural landscape. With a throbbing groove beneath her and a torchy, defiant vocal delivery, Curtis turns the performance into a moment of empowerment, strutting, twirling and locking eyes with the crowd as if reclaiming every lyric in real time.

Highlights come in rapid succession. “It’s a Sin” builds from a mystical opening into a raucous, dance-fueled explosion, with Curtis punctuating each refrain with sharp, physical movement. “A Little Respect” becomes a total audience clap-along, her voice effortlessly riding the track’s emotional peaks. “If You Leave” transforms the seated crowd into a communal dance floor, while “Bizarre Love Triangle” pulses with hypnotic intensity as both performers lock into its groove.

Just as infectious is their take on The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” which becomes a playful, semi-theatrical duet. As Hill steps in with the filtered vocal in the second verse – interestingly taking the female role – Curtis reacts in real time, half incredulous, half amused, turning the song’s familiar back-and-forth into a bit of live storytelling. She leans into the drama, punctuating lines with expressive gestures and sly glances, transforming the synth-pop classics into a wildly retro yet freshly animated crowd pleasing singalong.  

Yet what truly elevates the evening is the storytelling woven throughout. Curtis is a natural, hilarious and disarmingly honest narrator, spinning anecdotes about Gen X identity, early encounters with technology, adolescent crushes and the cultural artifacts that shaped her worldview. A particularly memorable sequence leads into “Take My Breath Away,” where she recounts seeing Top Gun at age eleven, sitting between her parents while processing the film’s now-iconic love scene knowing her ex-beau is in the audience—an experience she describes with such vivid, comedic detail that the eventual performance lands with both humor and genuine reflective resonance.

Elsewhere, she riffs on everything from Short Circuit to menopause to mixtapes, framing her generation as “punks and weirdos, theater kids and band geeks” who found belonging through music. These moments aren’t filler—they’re connective tissue, grounding the performance in lived experience and reinforcing the idea that 80s Kids is as much about identity as it is about sound.

Musically, the band moves fluidly between high-energy dance numbers and more introspective ballads. “Broken Wings” showcases Curtis’ ability to pull back into a more restrained, haunting delivery, while “Only You” creates a hypnotic, almost intimate atmosphere. Even lighter tracks like “Always Something There to Remind Me” carry a sense of joy that balances their lyrical melancholy.

By the time the show closes with “The Promise” and a soaring, deeply felt “Forever Young,” the through-line becomes clear. This isn’t just a fond, powerfully produced look back - it’s reclamation. Curtis and Hill aren’t simply revisiting the music of their youth; they’re reinhabiting it, reinterpreting their own histories through it, and offering it back to an audience that, whether they lived it or not, can feel its enduring pulse.

In that sense, 80s Kids represents not just an artistic evolution for Shannon Curtis, but a kind of full-circle arrival. The young woman who once sang alone at a keyboard has become a fearless, totally embodied performer—one who understands that the songs we grow up with don’t just shape us; they stay with us, waiting for the moment we’re ready to truly live inside them.

Photo credit: Nancy SchoegglThe post 80s KIDS at The Virgil, Los Angeles, CA first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Palantir is reportedly helping the IRS investigate financial crimesThe IRS has used Palantir's software since at least 2018, The Intercept reports.

Top memecoin holders expected to attend Trump luncheonThe US President has confirmed his attendance for the Florida event, but it's unclear whether Tron founder Justin Sun, suing the Trump family's crypto business, will appear.