Max Cooper is now on his 12th release with Traum and if that was a magic number, he has teamed up with Nicolas Bougaïeff who is the creative director of Liine in Berlin. He has built the controllers for the Plastikman Live 2010 tour and works together with Richie Hawtin with Liine. This company provides the Lemur App, Remiix Apps and Griid, amongst others. Nicolas Bougaïeff has recently completed his PhD in music. Ê The collaboration evolved in Berlin where both of them met and as Max says in his own words: "Nick contributed a load of ideas to this EP, one being this great patch he made using operator, with lots of nice squelch, and some cool melodic frameworks as a starting point." Ê Starting with "Fracture", this track is built on a massive bassline that could be described in sound as similar to a Roland 303, but we won't swear to that. Within the track a lot of eruptive sounds surface with force that show an almost "crystal and fractured shape", still being very much on the side of the dance floor. In fact Max Cooper has played these tracks in his recent live sets and regards them as very attractive to the dancing crowd. It is for the collaboration that the arrangement here of a typical Max Cooper track has undergone a strong change with advanced tools at work… the manipulation of sounds has been pushed to another though different level. The release with Nicolas Bougaïeff can therefore be described as an exciting stream of consciousness rather then an arrangement that has been fully formulated beforehand. ÊÊ "Meadows" is the most electronic-ambientish of all trax on the EP, somehow painted in golden colours with shades of Joy Division melancholy at the beginning, then diving into a much sweeter sea of sounds, bathing, relaxing, breathing, collecting energy… making use then of a of repetition in sound that reminds us of Steve Reichs methods. Ê "Ellipse" is another dance floor track again, working on two levels, one being the arpeggiator sequenced sound-melody that could as well be described as funky and early Luciano flavoured and on the other side featuring sound shaping that includes aspect of randomness. The central point of the track is the subtle evolving dynamic or rather a journey-like spirit. At the end of the track you realize you have come full-circle and this gives the track an organic feel not unlike "Fracture". ÊÊ The last track of the EP is" Walls" which could very well end up being a fantastic after-hour tune, since it is super reduced and almost haunting. It starts with a drum pattern meeting a controlled sequence of a single tone in repetition, which brutally gets interfered with by a strong fuzzy synth sound and creating something like a Radiohead kind of feeling! What a great closing track!