Max Cooper has once again placed himself at the intersection between electronic music and cinema. The London DJ and producer contributed the score for Swarm, a short film by the McGloughlin Brothers.
Swarm poses not-so-subtle commentary on urban sprawl. The six-minute montage opens with images of serene landscapes that give way to metropolitan overgrowth. Cooper’s contributions fittingly pair organic audio samples with sterile sound design in perfect sync with the visual patterns stitched together from footage at the micro and macro level.
“Development and destruction seem to go hand in hand when it comes to human progress on earth,” wrote the McGloughlin brothers in a joint statement. “There is a celebration of the human ability to create sophisticated environments in which we inhabit, but also a concern at the price that we are paying for this.”
“It is the story of our planet and us on it,” added Cooper. “Swarming. The huge scale of our impact on the planet presented as beautiful and terrifying growing structures as we see population growth time lapse set against frenetic activity.”
Swarm is by no means the first collaboration between Cooper and the McGloughlins. “Repetition,” “Resynthesis” and “Waves” are but a few songs on which he enlisted Kevin McLoughlin for the official music video.
Their latest endeavor stands out in that the visual elements came first, however. “Usually I write music alongside rough visual ideas from my project stories, and rely on the video artist to synchronize them for music videos,” Cooper said. “But this beast of a short film was presented more or less finished, and I had the daunting task of how to make the music live up to the feeling and spectacle of the film.”
The Swarm soundtrack is available in digital and vinyl formats across platforms here.
