Max Cooper follows up on his debut EP Human with this further slices of electronic introspection.
The Kindred EP opens with Origins, carefully crafted piece of experimental dance music that feels incredibly personal and human. The vocals of regular collaborator Kathrin de Boer are woven into the body of this track like a half-formed thought. It is the kind of dance music almost too sad to play to a dance floor... The soundtrack to memories of things that have slipped through your fingers, the Monday morning realisation that this is how things are now, the brain flooded with thoughts that pull you out of a crowded room back into your own personal museum of mental images and things left unsaid. It's a heartbreaking track, and one that Cooper slams widescreen-like black bars on in his extended version, which adds three-minutes to the four-minute original.
Voyage Through The Analogue Womb is a deep bath of bubbling analogue sound, rapid rhythms born of acid synth lines amid layers of crunchy, distorted melody. Less overtly emotive than Origins it nonetheless feels alive and conscious in a way most similarly restrained electronic music simply cannot.
Two further mixes of Origins fill out Kindred. David August creates a tightly wound take full of arpeggiated melodies and extends this to a punctured staccato vocal treatment of the sample. Finally the Throwing Snow remix starts with a softly building loop of the core melody before a sudden break builds in a hard rhythm and some broader, longer waves of melody. Both are excellent reimaginings of the original.
Kindred is out on 1 December through FIELDS, available to pre-order from Amazon.co.uk on MP3 [affiliate link]. Listen to Origins below.v