It’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.

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.

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).

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.”

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.

“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.