Listen To Max Cooper And Tom Hodge’s Contemplative Electronica Cut “Remnants”

Earlier this year, electronica producer Max Cooper released one of the finest installments in BBC 1's Essential Mix series—and I'm 99% certain that this gorgeous cut with Tom Hodge, "Remnants," landed somewhere in its two-hour glory, a series of piano sighs and clicking textures that yield surprisingly moving results. The track's taken from the pair's Artefact EP, out out April 20 (FOR THE WEEDHEADS, SON) via Cooper's FIELDS label.

"'Remnants' is a track about how we endow objects, photos, songs and other artefacts with meaning, even though they have none inherently," Cooper said in an email about this track. "Each time we experience them we get pulled back into the past, but with a slightly updated experience each time, constantly rewriting our memory until it becomes more about our associations with the artefacts themselves, and our ideas of the events that happened, than anything objectively real. The track tries to capture this feeling of old emotional ties, seen from a modern perspective - using traditional sound sources, the piano, and recordings of Tom hitting and clunking around inside an old broken piano, which were used to create the drums."

"For me, the old emotional ties are the piano chords and their harmonic motion; simple and well-worn but no less beautiful," Hodge added. "They are a temptation to drown in nostalgia and yet something is amiss and deeply contradictory, for the other sounds which make up the rhythm are brutal, atonal, uncomfortable and yet derived from the same source."

Lead image: Shaun Bloodworth