Max Cooper:
Many thanks to all of you who submitted your thoughts to my website over the last couple of years, there’s so much to share from a sort of collective psyche of inner thoughts as part of my new upcoming album project ‘On Being’.
The track was built from the anonymous quote "I have the feeling that something is missing, but I don't know what it is".
I had reached what seemed to be the end of writing my album. Time had run out, and I had to submit it and the deadline which I had already extended was approaching. But something didn't feel right, just like the quote. I had to write another track. So I dropped everything else and stayed up until it started getting light, a short sleep, then back on it, and repeat, trying to capture the feeling I was having.
It wasn't that it was a terrible thing to have lost someone or something we love, those ideas were present, but not what I was looking for in the feeling of the chord sequence. Instead, I was trying to write something to fill that gap with something positive, and to make something hopeful to round off the album process, which had been such a challenge, grappling with all the intensities and feelings of the submitted words.
So it's the last track I made, and the last track on the album (apart from the vinyl with an added bonus track). It's a simple, modulating 4 chord sequence and not much else, at times almost poppy in it's structure, but it felt right as closure on the project, which despite dealing with a lot of heavy human experience, was somehow enriching to work though. I hope that makes sense and you can feel some of what I'm trying to get at with it.
Justin M. Zielke incorporated these ideas into his beautiful stop frame sculptural process to tell the story of loss and hope visually. His work is really amazing, I’ll have lots more to explain about that in coming weeks, but for today, I hope you enjoy the new music and video.
Justin M. Zielke
The Missing Piece video explores a theme of self-reflection in a time of loss, whether it's the absence of a loved one, a longing for the past, or the ephemeral nature of existence itself. As the sculpture fractures and reforms, it mirrors the delicate balance between fragility and resilience, offering a hopeful message of renewal. Fusing dynamic sculpting with stop-motion animation, crafting visual pieces that transform and shift over time.
