MEMORIES
Client: Max Cooper
Album: One Hundred Billion Sparks
Year: 2018
Max Cooper // Artist Statement:
This is possibly my favourite track from the album, not because I think it's anything special musically, it's a simple track, but just because it carries a lot of feeling for me personally. It always had a strong and very specific feeling to it, so when I initially created the prophet and space echo chords, thinking I would develop it into some sort of percussive track, I soon discovered that anything I added only took away from its directness. So I left it as is, and then had a struggle trying to find the right title, given it's specificity of feeling. Memories was the most succinct title I could find, although it's more accurately to do with the bittersweet nature of the past. I gave this sprawling concept to the great video artist Roman De Giuli, who came up with the idea of representing our developing memories using his secret paints recipes, starting with simple colourless forms which become ever more complex, colourful and rich with pleasures and pains as we age. It's a very abstract result, but one I think is beautiful, and fitting with the piece of music. I hope you have a few minutes to take it in as a counterbalance to the hecticness of the day.
Roman De Giuli // Directors Statement
Speaking of Memories, we usually immediately relate to visual references like videos and photos from the past. By capturing images, we preserve an event in its most obvious appearance, which is a visual capsule. However, memories are much more than that. We are able to store infinite sensory impressions. All these impressions lead to something much bigger than the individual part: they blend to a feeling with a very strong immersive quality.
Listening to MEMORIES, the acoustic profile of this beautiful song did not speak visually to me at first sight. It was a rather emotional experience, a feeling of a vast space, flooded with endless streams and collections of impressions. A calm and steady flow of acoustic layers with endless reflections and echoes, adding up to an entity way bigger than a single thought, memory or feeling. The song is not about memories as such; it is more like the home of memories, at least for me.
The concept for the video was to use handmade organic visuals to create a space and a spectrum for what memories are or may be. I wanted to create natural fluid shapes, which expand and oscillate in the same smooth way as the song unfolds. Over time, these shapes should gain complexity, color and vibrancy. Thin lines of all colors and lights which slowly intertwine and interact. Organic patterns with a delicate aesthetic, mimicking neuronal structures of the human brain, intercut by large weightless figments, floating in infinity.
The video was entirely shot in a backlit petri dish in 8K resolution. I used a transparent base medium and constructed images color by color, layer by layer, from very basic shapes to highly complex compositions. It took many sessions of experimenting and shooting until I achieved what Max and I had in mind. All images got inverted and tweaked with additional lighting effects. Some shots were enhanced by slight 3D displacements to force the organic motion and it’s unique pattern. The primary color palette is rich and shiny, but I was also searching for complementary, kind of „in between“ colors and shades which are a bit off of hue, in comparison to the usual way I compose my images. I wanted to pick up the slightly detuned and interfering layers Max used in his composition. Although peaceful and harmonic, the song has a sentimental and sad expression at the same time. This is another important level of MEMORIES: The song truly covers the entire emotional aspect of what memories are, which is a broad spectrum of experiences of any shade and color.