Max Cooper will bring his distinctive style of combining intricate electronic musical compositions with complex audio-visual displays to London's Royal Albert Hall on 7 April 2026 - his largest and most ambitious performance to date.
The invitation is for his audience to experience the Royal Albert Hall - reimagined like never before. Using the enormous dome as a canvas for his ideas, he aims to create a visual and musical review and re-examination of his entire body of work.
“After over one hundred and fifty years of musical grandeur, there is an epic feeling to the space. So I’m putting all of my time, energy, and resources into creating something fittingly epic to match" says Cooper.
This will not be Cooper's first appearance in a world-renowned institute better known for classical orchestras: he has already graced the stages of London's Barbican in 2019, Paris's Pompidou Metz in 2022, Salzburg's Felsenreitschule Concert Hall in 2024, and - perhaps most notably - the Odeon of Herodes Atticus theatre in the Acropolis of Athens in 2021, making him the first techno artist to play in the 2,000-year-old amphitheatre.
"Royal Albert Hall is truly a beautiful and historic space - so it's simply an honour to work with the building and the team" says Cooper.
Next year's appearance in the Royal Albert Hall will mark his greatest artistic challenge yet: to deliver a retrospective on his entire catalogue of work, paired with new collaborations from selected visual artists in tandem with a new laser and light show created with Architecture Social Club.
Each of Cooper's albums have marked a key point in his journey as an artist, which began in 2007 when completing his PhD in computational genetics at the University of Nottingham whilst simultaneously performing as a resident club DJ. There he cut his teeth harnessing the latest in cutting edge musical technology to create "sound
sculptures" that defy definition, and which somehow combined his passions for both the sciences and the arts.
Always fascinated by the unimaginable complexity of the universe, yet inspired by the overwhelming emotions we as humans experience, he has always been driven by natural structure and felt form.
In Emergence (2016) and seminal tracks such as "Order from Chaos", "Waves" and "Symmetry", he celebrated how complex forms can emerge from the simplest of building blocks. Then with One Hundred Billion Sparks (2018) and tracks such as "Hope", "Identity" and "Memories", he turned his attention from the universe around us to the universe within us, contemplating how the hundred billion little wires inside all our heads somehow create the phenomenon of experience.
The next step, 2019's Yearning For The Infinite: "I wanted to explore the whole idea of human progress, the endless growth in technology and today's explosion in data, and boil this all down to its essence: our endless desire to move forwards, somehow, as individuals and as a species,” says Cooper.
Then 2022's Unspoken Words explored how music can surpass language in its ability to express the inexpressible, with nods to Wittgenstein and other philosophers. For this album he brought academics, scientists, visual artists, mathematicians and even dancers together for an accompanying hour-long film available in Dolby Atmos.
And with his most recent album On Being (2024), Cooper inverted the creative process, where works of art have traditionally sprung from some source deep within an artist, by instead drawing his inspiration from his audience to then reflect that back to us. By posing deep but open questions online, such as "What would you like to express which you cannot in everyday life?" he gathered thousands of anonymous quotes to try to understand what it is truly like to be human right now.
Beyond challenging himself to explore new art forms, Cooper has always strived to work with as wide a variety as possible of the world's most innovative minds, creators and institutions, such as Zaha Hadid Architects, Dolby, L-Acoustics, 4DSOUND, Barbican Centre, France TV, AND& and The Babraham Institute. Next year's show at the Royal Albert Hall will be no exception.
"I have been experimenting with new musical and visual techniques for many years, but this project demands that I bring together the best of the best in order to turn the enormous canvas of the Royal Albert Hall into the greatest experience we can possibly create."
The sign of a true artist is a constant desire to explore new terrain: never satisfied with previous works, they always seek new ways to explore their ideas, new forms to express their visions, and to produce something they have never made before, and - more importantly - something none of us have seen before.
Impossibly ambitious next year's performance may be, but it promises to be one thing at the very least: one of a kind.
Written by Zoe Cormier