Max Cooper and Aho Ssan- When I Sit Alone. In My Thoughts. I Am Crushed.
This song is from Max Cooper‘s latest album, On Being, released in February of this year. He has released several videos for the songs on the album, each directed by a different artist and based on a quote from a prompt on his website.
This video above was created by Simon Kounovsky aka axonbody.
More information on the album and song from Cooper in the Youtube video description–
The quote arrived on my album website after I asked “What do you want to express, which you feel you can’t in everyday life?”. Using thousands of anonymous quotes, my On Being album attempts to capture the experience of being human, now.
This was one of the first quotes from the database that reached out and grabbed my guts and squashed them. I had to tackle it, and I immediately contacted Aho Ssan with the idea, because his approach to music contained some of the intensity and noise elements that I felt were needed to deliver the quote.
It was submitted anonymously, so over the past few years I had a story in my mind about who submitted it and why. But then ahead of the Bristol show I heard from Robbie Evans, the writer of the words, who I met at the show. If any of you submitted any of the words in the project I’d love to hear from you so I can put a face to the name of the words I’ve spent my last 3 years with.
The writing process began with a live improvisation on Void and Vista Folds, which formed the structure of the 7 minute sequence. I then jammed with my hardware synths and pedals to introduce the aggression, and sent everything to Aho Ssan, who mangled and layered on his special blend.
The final touches came from a visit to Taichung, where recordings of the night market feature in the track, and finally, over compression to pump a sub bass into obliterating everything else to reach for some new chaos, for any you who have the full frequency response available. It was pure catharsis, and maybe not something many people will enjoy listening to, but that’s where the quote sent me, and hopefully it will be worthwhile for some of you.
3D/AV, Max Cooper’s live immersive audio-visual experience, is currently on tour and will be at The Belasco in Los Angeles on Saturday, 8/30/25.