In a highly publicized new interview on Salon.com, Brian Eno asserted that 'success ruins artists.' I beg to differ, especially after hearing the new Björk album Biophila and interviewing her engineer and Music Director Damian Taylor. Björk has used her success to collaborate, push boundaries and reach new heights in experimentation. Among other things, Damian employed Max to create alternative creative environments for Björk to conjure within.

Sean Booth and Rob Brown have always had a penchant for modifying and building their own hardware. Cycling 74's Max/MSP allows them to take the same creative approach in software, designing and implementing their own controllers, connections and sound generators. As you can see from the screen shots in this article, some of these are quite elaborate, with unusual and attractive visual interfaces.

"So this is an all-custom rig, centering on some serious collaboration, including custom programming and Max/MSP patching by Matt Davis (who calls it a “real instrument”), live show production by Martin Phillips of Bionic League, and Gregg Lacey of Vision Scenery."

at 5:27 you can see Mick Gordon building a device inside of Max.

Getter incorporates Cycling '74 Max into his Visceral live performances, as evidenced by a setup photo shared by nerdmatics on Instagram.

m[m] You have another long release coming out shortly on Blossoming Noise, the 4cd Turmeric, are you planning anymore larger works?

Masami Turmeric is next new work after Houjoue, with some of differences. I used MAX/MSP with contact mic and there are lots more feedback, noise sound on them.

Were you processing Thomas or Ian in the studio or just yourself?

It was really quite basic. It was like jazz playing. I didn’t process their instruments, but of course I processed my guitar. I use a Max/MSP patch for real-time processing.

In a discussion on Muffwiggler, a user mentions reading an interview with Carsten Nicolai, noting that Nicolai, who shares a similar sound to Ryoji Ikeda, uses software like Cycling '74 Max along with lab test oscillators for his tones. This suggests Ikeda may also utilize Cycling '74 Max in his work.

What is the toolkit you built in Max?

It’s basically a big standalone app I built in Max, which I then parted out into individual pieces for Max for Live, for working within Ableton Live. I knew that [Live] was gonna be the canvas for this thing because of its implementation with Max. It was either learn Max and deal with the idea of Max For Live controlling timing in Ableton, or learn Javascript and try to do it in Logic, and that seemed much harder. Ableton just feels like home right now.

"For my live set-up I split my signal between pedals going to an amp, and a laptop running Apple’s MainStage, which mainly hosts Cycling 74 plug-ins."

In the Ableton article "Monolake: Ghosts in the Machine," Moonlake discusses using Cycling '74 Max as part of their music production process.

So my colleague Boris Klompus and I put a contact mic on a set of Swedish spoons, and ciphened it through a Max MSP patch, and were able to doctor the attack / tone / decay to such a way that made it seem electric, and almost wrong-sounding, to make that tone ominous, gut-hitting, and wholly unignorable.