Dezeen Magazine

Numb music video by Henning Lederer for Max Cooper

Dezeen Music Project: our featured music video this week is an animation for techno producer Max Cooper's track Numb, which depicts the pressures of modern life in the style of an infographic. 

Numb music video by Henning Lederer for Max Cooper

Juxtaposing glitchy drums and bass lines with a freestyle jazz vocal by Kathrin deBoer of Belleruche, Numb is the lead track on Max Cooper's Conditions Two EP, released earlier this year.

"I wanted to make something quite deep and intense, to create an almost numbing experience by overloading [the listener] with the details on the drums and big, noisy drops," Cooper told Dezeen. "I was trying to numb by intensity, musically."

Numb music video by Henning Lederer for Max Cooper

Cooper approached German animator Henning Lederer to produce the video for the release after seeing Lederer's MA project, an animated representation of a machine called Machinatorium.

For the Numb video, Lederer added the running figure of a man to the centre of the machine, surrounded by whirring cogs and pistons.

Numb music video by Henning Lederer for Max Cooper

"I thought that infographic style would work really well if we applied the concept to a man numbed by the capitalist machine," Cooper explained.

"Whenever I write a piece of music I'm always trying to communicate some sort of idea and the addition of the visual aspect is a way of strengthening the communication of that idea."

Numb music video by Henning Lederer for Max Cooper

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