Max Cooper has a new album on the way. 

Yearning for the Infinite is the result of a commission from the Barbican, London’s arts and learning centre dedicated to pushing boundaries, which saw Cooper attempting to capture the vastness of infinity. It’s presented as both an album scored to a visual story and an immersive audio-visual live show, and is described as Cooper’s “most expansive” project to date. 

Using vast new visualisations of the infinite drawn from the history of its appearances in the arts and sciences, Cooper explores the link between human nature and the unbounded— “our evolving desires set just out of reach, as an unshakable source of meaning in our lives,” the label explains. 

Sonically, the album merges Cooper’s affinity for rich harmony and spatial manipulation with sweeping acoustics and subtly evolving motifs. It offsets vast textures against microscopic drum patterns. 

Tasked with translating such a concept to a live performance, each track on the album is carefully mapped out to support the narrative. The live project documents forms of the infinite set against their role in the human condition. 

Ahead of the album’s release, Cooper has shared “Perpetual Motion,” a track written for “that moment at the end of the night when all the experiments and madness is over and we just need a nice warm chord sequence to send us home in a good mood,” Cooper explains. 

One Hundred Billion Sparks, Cooper’s last album, came out in 2018. 

Yearning for the Infinite LP is out August 1 via Cooper’s  Mesh label. More information on the album and the concept behind it can be found over at Bandcamp. 

Tracklisting

01. Let There Be

02. Repetition

03. Parting Ways (with Six Sigma)

04. Perpetual Motion

05. Circular

06. Aleph2

07. Scalar (feat. Alison Moyet)

08. Nanotech (feat. Wilderthorn)

09. Penrose Tiling

10. Transcendental Tree Map

11. Morphosis

12. Void

13. A Fleeting Life (feat. James Yorkston)

14. In Pursuit of Ghosts (with Tom Hodge)