Emergence is the story of natural laws and processes, their inherent beauty, and their action to yield the universe, us and the world we live in.

I began working on this project in 2013, when I was thinking about how I could link my interests in science, music and visual arts together. I started with the idea of emergence, and wrote a visual story, which I used to score the music to, leading to the live show, and album of the same name. As the final piece of the project, I collaborated with Dolby to create an Atmos version, using their tools of cinema applied to music, to yield a 3-dimensional soundscape with height as well as 360 directionality, which is now available here.

The story is told using a universe timeline, from pre-big bang to future, with each chapter a collaboration with a different visual artist, including some collaborations with mathematicians or scientists for those chapters using real data visualisation. As such, there is a huge range in visual styles, and for each different idea and piece of music I had in mind, it was a matter of finding the right visual artist and approach to try and tell that part of the story. My aim with this multi-styled format was to try and keep the abstract narrative engaging, and to rely on the over-arching story to tie the chapters together.

This site outlines the content of the entire Emergence project, of which the album, live shows and Blu-ray are only sub-sets, with information on the ideas involved in each section and chapter, as well as a summary of the visual and audio content, and credits and links for the many collaborators who took part in the project. It is not supposed to be a rigorous scientific presentation of ideas, the project is my own interpretation of the modern scientific story, told through visual art and music, with a focus on those ideas that I find most interesting and revealing.

It’s been an absolute pleasure working with all the amazing visual artists and musicians involved, and all the better because I’ve been able to learn a lot of interesting things, and delve into ideas that I find exciting as part of a music project. It proved to be such a rewarding process that it set the blue print for all my albums since, and was instrumental in leading to the creation of my Mesh label, which is focused on releasing music which is part of wider creative projects such as this.

Thank you for having a deeper look into Emergence, and I hope you find some things in there which you enjoy. Max