Thomas Vanz for Max Cooper: Let There Be

November 27, 2019 Arseny Vesnin

Motion artist Thomas Vanz just release his latest collaboration with Max Cooper for his new track “Let There Be”

I wanted to start the project with the earliest visual example of the infinite I could find reference to - the bright white light of Kabbalah. The magician of liquid systems, Thomas Vanz told me he had a new secret recipe which could deliver what I needed, so I set about scoring to this idea based around what I know of Thomas’ work. The whole project functioned in this way, starting with my written descriptions of each chapter, then finding a visual artist to carry out that side of things, while in parallel I scored the music to the imagined final result. At some point down the line the first visual and musical sketches arrived and things could be refined at each end to marry the music and visual together seamlessly. The music for this chapter needed something with a feeling of grandeur and space, mysteriousness and mysticism. It all came down to some really sparse drawn out chords and plenty of different layers of saturation with pedals (plenty of Metasonix F1, Moogerfooger overdrive, Industrialelctric RM1N, Fairfield Circuitry Meet Maude, WMD Geiger Counter), with smatterings of more distorted hits running through a heavy (Big Sky) plate reverb to punctuate the scale even more. Visually, we complemented Thomas’ growing light animation with ancient cave painting imagery in order to tie the visual abstraction to the human story, and the birth of our yearning for the infinite. For the live show I use two layers of screens to first show the structure hovering in front of stage, then to slowly reveal the rear backlit screen and my position between them, as a means of slowly adding a 3-dimensional depth effect as the music and visual peaks.

Max Cooper