Guest
Max Cooper: We now look outward and the narrative is completed as the emergent mind returns to its home in the wider system that created it. I was trying to communicate the feeling of perspective with the music. Us, as individuals, as a tiny speck looking out into the vastness, but also, occupying it. It was written with this theme for a reason, having originated from a very unusual job. I was asked to make music for a UN summit focused on climate action, where world leaders would sit with eyes closed and listen to the piece. It was the Trump era at the time, and so my task was how to bring the giant egos into check, how could I make them feel small and the natural world feel relevant? Of course I would have failed, and in the end the brief changed (resulting in the “Imagine for 1 minute” project with Pope Francis, Greta Thunberg and others narrating), but I was left with this piece of music which I had a approached from a very particular perspective which lent itself to the Unspoken Words project and the closing sequence of the film version of the album. I was extremely happy to find out that my long term collaborator and master of epic scales, Thomas Vanz, was interested in the idea and the piece of music. Thomas created a continuation of the story from our “Hope” collaboration (from the album/project ‘One Hundred Billion Sparks’), which looks at internal neuronal processes, finishing with the eye. Now we start with the eye where that left off, and look out of the body into the vastness as only Thomas can, with his secret concoctions of chemicals yielding chaotic fractal processes which tie the aesthetics of the micro to the macro scales of our surroundings. The story of Unspoken Words ends with our final expansion, and a fictional resolution to the human condition of escaping all constraints. Music: Max Cooper, Visuals: Thomas Vanz
