Unspoken Words

Album review

This album allows us to venture into the mind of Max Cooper. This British artist is back with a new audio-visual project following Yearning for the Infinite in 2019, which was developed for the Barbican Centre in London. Unspoken Words is based on 13 short films produced by Nick Cobby, the man who’s been directing Cooper’s videos for years, and photographer Andrey Prokhorov, who has a vast library of images from all over the world. These films served as the basis for Cooper’s album, which focuses on the limitations of language. Another inspiration behind the album was the work of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose writings often told of the imperfections of language, concluding “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”.

It's the unspeakable that’s expressed so perfectly on this particularly eclectic album, with the Californian singer Kotomi lending her delicate vocals to two tracks, Inanimate to Animate and A Model of Reality. There’s a handful of more contemplative tracks too, including Ascent, which sounds like a load of drones emerging from the ground before bursting into the sky with a blinding light. It also seems that Cooper’s brain needs to bust some moves on the dancefloor, with the bicep-style breakbeats in Spectrum, a track that somehow manages to be simultaneously joyful and melancholic; a kind of emotion there’s no name for, justifying the concept of Max Cooper’s most intuitive album. © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz