Max Cooper - One Hundred Billion Sparks (2018) [Hi-Res]

During the recording of One Hundred Billion Sparks, his first album for two years, Max Cooper did a lot of thinking. Developed concurrently with a new live show, he says every track on the 12-track set was written "as a score to a virtual story stemming from this system of one-hundred billion sparking neurons which create us". The resultant music is naturally widescreen and epic in tone, with early electronic "movements" - think neo-classical minded ambient soundscapes - slowly making way for more immersive, beat-driven dancefloor fare as the album progresses. It's an approach that pays dividends time and again, whether on the delicately spacey and cinematic beauty of standout ambient cut "Reciprocity", or the more rhythmic pulse of "Emptyset" and the shuffling IDM bliss of "Platonic".