EMERGENCE - No one can hear you scream in space!
But I just got done listening to this and my mind screamed several times "OH HELL YES!"
Combined with the stunning visuals this music opens up your mind and allows it to run with ideas and avenues of creative thought. We have been so programmed over decades with the bombardment of Pop music, that it's important to break those bonds and think more eclectically in order to grasp the brilliance of this title. My belief is that this sort of experience is also great in order to keep our brains more active and seeing things from a different perspective. What we as humans experience day to day is only a fraction of activity that goes on all around us, especially in the microscopic/molecular levels (where the real action is.) For instance as gardeners; folks like @beerking and myself are reminded of how important the world of microorganisms are to the soil that grows our food. It's not just dirt, it's full of life that we rarely see or pay attention to. Is it really that easy to grow, say, potatoes on another planet like Mars? I have my doubts due to the symbiotics of our planet's microorganisms.
Another thought I had was how sound needs substance (air) or other, in order to travel through to another location. So how does that affect hearing music at sea level as opposed to someone listening at high altitudes like Denver CO. or even higher; is more power output needed to receive the same volume levels?
While watching this, I really wanted to get inside the visuals via something like a VR headset, in order to be fully enveloped and take this on properly given the music that accompanies it.
I consider this more Techno/Electronic than something like New Age music. I wondered if the artist had absorbed some influence from Amin Bhatia. I am only able to listen to this in 5.1; and as good as that is, I also felt I could be missing out on a lot of aural 3D effects that would come out in a true Atmos environment.
If I was a Sci-Fi movie producer I believe I'd also want to hire Max Cooper to work on the alien landscapes and visuals - you know like:
"Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."
The music does vary somewhat with each track; for example while listening to track 3 "Waves" I thought it might be a nice vehicle for a great singing performance by someone like Seal.
This Blu-ray title is a good example of the possibilities I've been envisioning for the format - visuals tied in with the music. Hopefully it's just a small taste of what's to come from this format.
I don't know anything about Max Cooper, but now I intend to find out.
*** A possible word of caution- given the intensity of the visuals, if you believe you or someone in your household may be affected by Photosensitive Epilepsy (PSE) go forth carefully with this one.
Here's some more info from the Amazon page about the title and artists involved.
EMERGENCE is an epic, immersive audio-visual experience, the debut film directed and soundtracked by Max Cooper.
The story explores the development of the universe, the creation of unexpected and often beautiful outcomes from simple natural systems, and how complexity, like human beings, can spawn from the immaterial by the action of simple laws embedded in the foundations of reality.
The project was initially released in 2016 as a soundtrack to Max's live show narrative exploring the concept of emergence . Over time, chapters of the story have been shared online and featured in Cooper's live shows.
Now with audio remastered in surround sound by Cooper and the engineers at Dolby Atmos, the project is finally available as a monumental 90 min animated film.
The work is a marriage of cosmic awe and wonderment, a meditation on the mystery of our emotional connection to fundamental natural form. Referencing Koyaanisqatsi and Samsara in approach, but grounded in imagery from science rather than classic cinematography.
Few artists are as qualified as Max to approach as profound an idea as emergence through electronic music and video. Max received a Ph.D in computational biology in 2008 with research on the evolution of gene regulatory networks and was a geneticist at UCL before he switched to music. To this end he collaborated with artists Andy Lomas, Nick Cobby and Henning M Lederer plus mathematician Dugan Hammock.
In each chapter of the Emergence narrative, the focus is on the beauty of the natural laws and processes in operation, with a mixture of real data visualization and animated film. It interprets the deep structures and principles that give rise to the familiar physical universe, such as symmetries, the distribution of the primes, waves, spatial dimensionality, and the action of the physical forces on matter. Later chapters tackle the emergence of biological forms, thought and eventually a darker turn into the structures and systems of human civilization.
Max has synthesized his skill as a producer and his deep interests in science to create a unique experience to explore the sonic limits of home audio.