Over the last 15 years, electronic music producer Max Cooper has been on a slow and steady rise to the top of his game, where he now sits alongside fellow Northern Irish artists Bicep, David Holmes and Hannah Peel among others.
The London-based musician, visual artist and DJ looked set for a promising academic career when he was in his 20s – he has a PhD in computational biology and worked as a researcher.
However, he gave it all up for music in the late 2000s, and 15 years later it's still looking like a good decision. “I really love having my own project where no-one else can tell me what to do, and I can just obsess about something and delve in,” he tells Belfast Live.
“Academia allowed me to do that and music allows me to do that as well. It's the way I like to work.”
The work has been prolific, with six studio albums, dozens of smaller releases and DJ mixes to his name so far.
Cooper’s live shows are legendary too - he considers himself an audio-visual artist, placing just as much emphasis on the visual spectacle as on the music, and in 2021 this approach reached its apex when he performed in front of 5,000 people at the Acropolis in Athens, projecting onto the ancient marble columns of the Parthenon behind the stage.
This Friday night’s gig at the newly reopened Mandela Hall may not quite be in the same category as the Acropolis, but it promises to be very special in any case. Cooper reveals that the stage will be set up with two screens – one behind him and another between him and the audience.
“I call it 3D-AV because things can jump out onto a screen which is closer to the audience, so you get a depth effect,” he says.
As far as the music is concerned, it’s best to approach a Max Cooper show with an open mind – like the best DJs, even he doesn’t know what’s going to happen.
“I never pre-plan shows,” he says. “I'll wait and see who's there, what it sounds like, how many people are standing, how many people are sitting, how they respond when I put certain things on... The whole show is totally flexible.
“My job is to try things subtly and see how people respond, and then give them more what they like and less of what they don't like.”
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That’s called reading the crowd - that key DJing skill that can determine how the night will go, as it happens. In Cooper’s case, that means you could hear banging techno, soothing ambient, glitchy electronica, drum and bass or any combination of the above.
“I still approach it like a DJ,” he says. “It means I can try something new and I don't get bored of having to play the same thing over and over. At the end of the day, my job is to make the best possible show I can, and I don't want to restrict myself.”
It’s been almost 25 years since Cooper lived in Northern Ireland - he moved to England for university in 1999, relocated to London with his then-girlfriend and, he says wryly, “just got stuck here, basically”.
But 1990s Northern Ireland was absolutely foundational to his love for electronic music, from travelling all over the country to techno clubs in small towns, when such things still existed, to dancing at Shine in the original Mandela Hall to DJs like Carl Cox and Belfast’s own Phil Kieran – who’s now a friend.
“My friend Boyd was into techno, electronic music and trance,” he recalls. “We started going to clubs when we were 16/17, started DJing as well and just got a taste for it.
“We used to travel around every weekend, so we'd go to Shine a lot, but also travel out of Belfast.
“Occasionally we did Kelly's [in Portrush], The Met in Armagh, there was one called Exit 15 down the motorway [in Dungannon ]. We would just drive around to wherever we could find [a party], so it was straight into the whole scene.”
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It was Cooper’s interest in science that took him away from Northern Ireland, first to Nottingham and then to Manchester to study, eventually culminating in his PhD in his late 20s. But music was always there, running parallel to his studies, and in the late 2000s he decided to take the plunge as a full-time musician.
By his own admission, Cooper hasn’t been back home as much as he might have liked – it’s not easy when you spend as much time on the road as he does – but the musician insists that he still feels a connection with our shores.
“I feel very connected in terms of the land,” he says. “I would always jump on my bike and I'd be off, down towards Bangor or across to Newtownards and the peninsula; Strangford Lough and Belfast Lough.
“There are so many beautiful places that have left a massive impact on me, emotionally and aesthetically, and I miss that a lot, living over here.
“And then the other thing is that once you've experienced a big group of friends in Belfast and going out every weekend and the mindset that that creates, that’s something that's always with you.”
The brand new Mandela Hall on a Friday night seems like the perfect time and place to celebrate that feeling.
Max Cooper plays the Mandela Hall at Queen's University, Belfast on Friday 17th February. Tickets from mandelahall.com/events/max-cooper
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