|
|
viewing 1 To 13 of 13 items
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
CD
|
|
RM 4242CD
|
From Mike Cooper: "I made the first set of pieces for this collection during the intense heat of the 2023 Spanish summer; 32 degrees inside the house at night sometimes. I had just finished reading one of the most extraordinary volumes of fiction (something I rarely read) titled The Guyana Quartet by the Caribbean writer Wilson Harris. I came to this book via the works of Nathaniel Mackay, who recommended Wilson Harris as an important influence on his own creative writing. While researching further for my Tropical Gothic project I came across another writer from Guyana, Edgar Mittelholzer, and his book My Bones And My Flute. The two books couldn't be more different. Mittelholzer's book is described as 'a ghost story in the old-fashioned manner,' while The Guyana Quartet is one of the strangest books I have ever read. A lot of the time I had no idea what was going on but its strangeness kept drawing me into it and onwards. It is extremely psychedelic and tropical gothic with an added healthy dose of quantum time. Sometimes the characters are both alive and dead at the same time. The stories all takes place either in the Amazon basin rainforests of Guyana or the Rupununi Savannah, home to a vast array of exotic wildlife which includes jaguars, sloths, monkeys, giant otters, tapirs, emerald tree boa snakes and more. I wanted this musical edition to be an aural reflection of the landscapes conjured in my mind's eye as I was reading. Most of my samples and loops are created using a ukulele, my fingers, a metal hip-flask, (for rum), an empty St James Rum bottle, field recordings from Martinique, electric and acoustic lap steel guitar and a virtual pedal steel guitar. The flute player is unknown but maybe from Vietnam. The titles of my pieces are mostly taken from the two books as well as the title, Slow Motion Lightning, which resonated with me as a description of our current situation with regards climate change, and other man-made disasters that have occurred since beginning the pieces. Slow Motion Lightning; deadly and unpredictable never strikes twice in the same place except when it does."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
RM 4209CD
|
A note from Mike Cooper: "Collaboration, improvisation, innovation. The remit for Black Flamingo. During the Covid lockdown period I started long distance collaborations with a team of friends and made Oceans Of Milk And Treacle for Room40 (RM 4176CD). A family of long-time associates plus some more recent and one that I have never met in person. All of them with a unique ability to respond creatively, in any genre or context, in a creative, spontaneous and improvised manner . . . Featuring Geoff Hawkins on tenor sax. Our 60 year friendship goes back to the 1960s and my first band The Blues Committee then on through the 1970s to Trout Steel and The Machine Gun Company on the Dawn label meeting up again in the mid-1990s on my Island Songs CD . . .Elliott Sharp, guitarist, composer, improviser from the Downtown New York music scene. We first played together in Rome many years ago. We have a duo digital collection on my Bandcamp site and here on Black Flamingo, Elliott plays bass clarinet. Jon Raskin, a founder member of The Rova Saxophone Quartet based in California surprised me one night in London by appearing in the audience at a folk club concert I gave . . . Scot Ray, slidationist; lap steel and pedal steel guitar visionary. We have never met in the real(?) world, only online. I am always seeking audacious players of both those instruments and Scot is a true star . . . Michael Thieke, a fellow parttime Roman parttime Berliner member of the International Nothing brings peace on the clarinet with breathy playing on this most beautiful of wind instruments. Viv Corringham has shared her voice on many past musical roads with me from Greek Rembetronika to an improvising trio with Lol Coxhill and Soundwalks in hills around Hong Kong. Tim Hill on baritone sax. We go back to my 1980s in Reading in the UK. Together we had Beating Time with Paul Burwell on drums and Gary Jones on bass, both sadly gone now and Mayhem Quartet with Pat Thomas on keys and Neil Palmer our improvising DJ both happily still with us. Then we started Trystero System which became a floating membership duo spanning several years and has included both Viv Corringham and Pat Thomas with myself and continues from time to time. Lastly, The Migrant School of Bodies Choir was the result of a workshop in Milan for a performance/dance piece organized by choreographer/dancer Ariella Vidach. The text is each member counting from one to 26 in their own language each one starting to count after the neighbor had reached the number eight. Most of the members were from Africa and shared no common African language..."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
RM 4176CD
|
From Mike Cooper: "This is a soundtrack for an otherwise silent film. The title of the album, and of course the film, is borrowed from my late friend Fred Hardy's book The Religious Culture of India - Power, Love and Wisdom, considered to be one of the most important books on the subject. In this book Fred wrote... 'In 1835 the historian Macaulay investigated whether there was anything in the traditional Indian systems of learning and education that could be used in the training of native personnel. In fairness to Mr Macaulay, we must remember that those were days long before the writings of a Tolkien or a Mervyn Peake. He came to the devastating conclusion that people who believe in oceans of milk and treacle had nothing to offer to a modern system of education. A straightforward, realistic assessment in an age that believed in science and realism! The effects were far-reaching. Traditional Indian ways of looking at the world were written off as obsolete. India was provided with three universities (Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, founded in 1857) as the hothouses to nurture a custom-built, English-speaking Indian intelligentsia. A new age began for India, and two of its inevitable consequences were the demand for independence and the production of atomic bombs and satellites by the post-independent Bhārat.' . . . A Hydra is a genus of small, fresh-water organisms native to the temperate and tropical regions. Biologists are especially interested in Hydra because of their regenerative ability -- they do not appear to die of old age, or indeed to age at all. Some long time fellow musical travelers are called upon to lend a hand on this album. Saxophonists Geoff Hawkins and Aaron Hawkins. Geoff is on many of my earlier records and we have known each other for over 60 years. Aaron is one of his sons. Viv Corringham -- vocalist and 'deep listening' artist dedicated to walking, listening and singing all at the same time in her work which she calls Shadow Walks. Saxophonist Tim Hill, now established in the West Country of England where he organizes musical street theater events and several small ensembles playing free improvised and composed music. Lol Coxhill and Roger Turner, colleagues from The Recedents, an improvising music trio we had for 20 plus years, appear in a short extract from our five-CD box set Wishing You Were Here. Lol is unfortunately no longer with us. I was moved to embrace how the digital, virtual, acoustic and natural worlds intersect in making this edition."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
EG 002LP
|
Originally released in 2005 on Mike Cooper's Hipshot Cd-r label, and reissued here for the first time on vinyl, Spirit Songs deserves to be regarded as a true rediscovered gem, remixed and remastered by Mike Copper himself. Spirit Songs comes as a highly organic form of ambient-folk-blues with Cooper reordering material to create an immersive listening experience. A stream of cut-up lyrics inspired by Thomas Pynchon's writing slide across multiple electronic layers and masterfully fingerpicked acoustic guitars combining into a moving tide. This is deeply inspired music from a unique artist: Mike Cooper the so-called "icon of post-everything music" a true sound explorer constantly pushing the boundaries of genres and styles, folk, blues, free improv, exotica, ambient, electronica.
"Spirit Songs... a glorious marriage of all three of Cooper's previous musical strategies; creating a stunning hybrid. The album contains ten songs performed on finger-picked acoustic and electric lap steel guitar, often looped and treated in real time, with Cooper singing lyrics in a quietly meandering, semi-improvisatory manner that recalls a more polished Jandek. The style of songwriting is immediately recognizable as blues, but an intuitive, idiosyncratic form of folk-blues, with Cooper narrating laments over matters personal and global, gentle universalisms that double as political messages. All of this occurs over a loose rhythmic framework provided by various noisy loops, with cracks, scratches and pops, echoes and distortions skipping out from every refrain. It's a gentle cacophony with subtle undercurrents of beauty and sadness, effortlessly nostalgic but still very rooted in the now. I think that Mike Cooper can genuinely call this style his own; I've never heard anything remotely like it, and it works beautifully, highlighting both song and singer, as well as the happy accidents resulting from the intersection of structure and chaos." --Brainwashed
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
RM 4117LP
|
From Mike Cooper: "Playing With Water is a novel written by James Hamilton-Paterson. I was introduced to his writing by the Australian poet Peter Bakowski who gave me a copy of his book Seven Tenths - The Sea And Its Thresholds; a book that influenced my record Globe Notes and subsequent works immensely. Another of his books Playing With Water: Passion And Solitude On A Philippine Island is about exactly what the title describes it as and provided me with the title. The first edition on my Hipshot c.d.r label in 1999 was titled Kiribati and was dedicated to the people of that Pacific Island nation as I shared their concern, then as now, with the fact of rising sea levels due to global warming which threatens to destroy or make uninhabitable their low lying island homes. That album was the start of a long musical and artistic journey for me . . . Cities such as Venice, Bangkok, Jakarta, London, Manhattan or any coastal, or near a major river, city will be subject to serious flooding and subsidence and may well become uninhabitable in the same way in the very near future. Bangkok was previously known as 'The Venice Of South East Asia' and its now roads were once canals . . . Jakarta is currently sinking at such an alarming rate that the Indonesian Government is building a new capital city in Kalimantan (Borneo) Several of my albums subsequent to Kiribati -- Globe Notes, Rayon Hula, Reluctant Swimmer/Virtual Surfer, Fratello Mare, Raft, Oceanic Feeling-Like (with Chris Abrahams) and now Playing With Water are all conceptually concerned with this same subject. Another conceptual thread connecting them is my concern for the co-habitation of the human and non-human world expressed through my use of unprocessed avian or insect field recordings of song, signs and signals. Climate change, as well as the destruction by humans of the natural habitat of many species, is disturbing the balanced relationship we need to have with nature. Indigenous and small, often nomadic, coastal communities are very aware of this balance and the incursion of the industrial world into their way of life is having disastrous effects which will (if not already) have similar effects and repercussions on ours. There are field recordings on this edition from Pulau Ubin, Ko Phayan, Ko Lanta, Sri Lanka, Bangkok, St.Lucia and Martinique; all places that can look forward to or are already witnessing the Postdiluvian Future . . . My guitar playing here, as always, draws on a number of styles and genres influenced by Hawaiian Slack-key and lap steel guitar."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
TDP 54006LP
|
Trading Places present a reissue of Mike Cooper's Oh Really!?, originally released in 1969. The guitarist and singer-songwriter Mike Cooper was a key figure in the British blues boom of the late 1960s. Born in Reading in 1942, Cooper began playing guitar as a teen in local skiffle groups. After seeing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee perform in 1961, Cooper caught the blues bug and began to play the harmonica and formed The Blues Committee, supporting John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Alexis Korner, and Long John Baldry, while Cooper was also performing solo. Acquiring a lap steel guitar in 1963, he studied Blind Boy Fuller's work and in 1965, teamed with Dave Hall to support Bert Jansch, Al Stewart, and others; after releasing work on the Kennet, Sydisc, and Matchbox labels, Cooper soon began incorporating country blues aspects into his work, drawing from Son House and Mississippi Fred McDowell, as well as non-blues artists such as David Bowie, John Martyn, Roy Harper, and Dave Van Ronk. Then, in late 1968, Cooper was approached by producer Peter Eden, resulting in debut album Oh Really!? for Pye; aside from agreeable covers of Son House's "Death Letter" and Blind Boy Fuller's "Bad Luck Blues", the rest of the disc is pure Cooper, with his deft picking accompanied by Derek Hall's guitar work only on "Leadhearted Blues" and "Electric Chair". 180 gram vinyl; 45rpm. Licensed by BMG.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
RM 496LP
|
Room40 offer a re-mastered, re-edited 2019 version of Rayon Hula, originally released in 2004. From Mike Cooper: "After several trips, beginning in 1994, to the Pacific and its Island Nations, Australia and subsequently to South East Asia, I conceived the idea of making an updated more 'now' version of some of the Exotica music that originated in 1950's America. Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny were the two I mostly had in mind at the time, but I didn't want it to sound like them and the two words 'Ambient' and 'Electronic' had to figure large. I was deeply influenced by the ambience of the places I was visiting (Australian birds are scarily creative) and lo-fi electronics were something I had been working with in my free improvisation gigs since the '80s . . . No-one was issuing recorded work by me, so I started my own DIY cd.r. label, Hipshot, and sold them via the internet. I was free to record whatever I wanted and I did, starting in 1999 with Kiribati . . . The summer of 2004 house sitting in Palombara, 40 minutes outside of Rome, at our friend Jo Campbell's house, in the company of several dogs and numerous cats, I set to work outside in the shed with a Zoom Sampletrack ST-224, two mini disc recorders and a Tascam four track cassette machine; a pile of Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny CDs and my lap steel. My intention was to create a kind of music that I had hoped to hear when we visited Hawaii in the early '90s (some kind of Hawaiian Futurism maybe?) which we never did. Rayon Hula appeared from the shed and was initially released as Hipshot c.d.r. HIP-007. I submitted it to the Ars Electronica awards in Austria and was very surprised when it received some kind of a prize. I think that David Toop had something to do with that, as he was on the jury (thanks David). It was picked up by Cabin Records, a new label initiated by Pete Fowler and Graham Erickson and released as a double 10-inch vinyl set . . . Although the idea was an homage to Arthur Lyman, it was also an homage to Steve Feld who introduced me to the concept of 'lift up over sounding' in his book Sound and Sentiment, a study of the Kaluli people of Papua and their relationship with their aural environment. From it I gleaned, among other things, the idea of looped sounds played simultaneously but out of sync. An idea which had in fact guided me from the beginning of the series."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
BW 024LP
|
A new Mike Cooper release is always a great event. Mike Cooper on the recording: "Distant Songs Of Madmen was recorded live in Palermo and was my solo set in a concert organized by Lelio Gianetti and Curva Minore, which included Truth In The Abstract Blues and Eugene Chadbourne. My set was free improvisation; some cover versions of folk and pop songs and some of my own songs. The title of the record and some of the improvised pieces were taken from Sam Shepard's writing. Sam, one of my favorite writers, has sadly died since I recorded this record and I dedicate it to his memory." Artwork by Italian artist Carla Indipendente. Mastered for vinyl by Brian Pyle (Ensemble Economique). Includes insert; edition of 300.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
RM 484LP
|
Mike Cooper's output of the past half century has been described as "post-everything". It's a fitting phrase really when you consider he has been at the beating heart of so many critical musical moments; from the development of the blues touring circuit in the UK, through the growth of the folk scene and into the explosion of free improvisation that came to define a generation of UK musicians. Amidst it all, working at stitching these disparate forms into some kind of de-territorialized zone, was Mike Cooper. It's fitting that he explores the notion of journey on his latest full-length edition. Even more fitting that he examines the vessels that carry us on journeys. With Raft, Cooper charts his interests in ambient exotica and collides it with his research into various South Pacific musical traditions. The record extends his palette considerably, stretching away from the hypnagogic flows of his master piece Rayon Hula (2004), into a more oceanic setting. "Raft 21 - Guayaquil To Tully", for example, sets out a lilting rise and fall of harmony which erupts with spluttering electronics. Specifically inspired by Vital Alsar and William Wills, sailors who undertook some of the 20th century's most impressive solo voyages, Raft reflects upon the determination of the solo traveler. In a musical sense, Mike Cooper's work of recent years has very much reflected a determined solo traveler work ethic. In his commitment to travel alone, he has developed a range of strategies that he works against as a means of surprising himself and uncovering unfamiliar sonic relations. This approach has proved an incredibly fertile pursuit for Cooper, arguably producing some of his most affecting and engaging works, his Room40 albums Fratello Mare (RM 462LP, 2015) and White Shadows Of The South Seas (RM 454CD, 2013) amongst them. Raft is a vital record that sets its sights beyond the horizons of convention and in doing so reveals a perspective that is only available to lifelong voyagers such as Mike Cooper. From Mike: "Raft is my tribute to William Willis, Vita Alsar, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Becke, Adolph Plate, Jacques Brel, FW Murnau and to all sailors, scribblers and drifters everywhere."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
CREP 038LP
|
The "icon of post-everything", Mike Cooper, returns to Discrepant with a recording of a live set recorded at the Controindicazioni Festival of Improvised Music in Rome in 2003. Originally released as a CDr via his Hipshot label. The music moves very slowly through four movements: "Reluctant Swimmer", "Movies Is Magic", "Virtual Swimmer", and "Dolphins". Praise from an unknown source: "Floating in out of the exotic ether and disappearing like smoke, engulfed in the alien hugeness of nature... a very elegant set by a visionary artist." Mike Cooper on the recording: "The first half is played on my old 1920s National tri-plate lap steel guitar and the second half on my Vietnamese electric lap steel. I also sing two songs along the way. 'Movies Is Magic' by Van Dyke Parks and 'Dolphins' by Fred Neil. It was the first time I had ever sung the last song." RIYL: Exotica, Andrew Pekler, Dolphins Into The Future.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
CREP 021LP
|
First vinyl release of Kiribati, the first installment in the acclaimed Ambient Exotica Soundscapes series by veteran English experimentalist Mike Cooper. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Edition of 500. "This was the first release on my Hipshot c.d.r label in 1999. I wanted to create an album of imaginary soundscapes from imagined exotic places based on my travels in the Pacific Islands and South East Asia. Kiribati was the first in a series of three CDs of Ambient Exotica Soundscapes -- played on lap steel, electronics, prepared guitar, sampler, live environmental recordings (from Bali, Malaysia, Australia and Italy) and acoustic and electronic percussion. (The other two are Globe Notes and my award winning Rayon Hula.) Kiribati was (and is) dedicated to the people and islands of Kiribati because they were slowly sinking into the Pacific Ocean. Although the palm trees are often 25 metres high, the islands themselves, made from gravel and sand, are only 4 or 5 metres above sea level and a rise in sea levels of just 15 centimetres, as has happened over the past 100 years due to global warming, is a disaster. Kiribati was recorded in my studio on a four track cassette, using a Casio SK1 sampling keyboard. A tool I used for many years both for recording and live sampling." --Mike Cooper
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
RM 454CD
|
It's difficult to know how to summarize the meandering journey that has been the life and times of Mike Cooper. Having just celebrated his 70th year of mischief making, here's what we can tell you: a young Mike Cooper can be spotted playing a beatnik guitarist on an anti-nuclear march in London beat cult film That Kind of Girl. His first band, The Blues Committee, played with and supported blues legends such John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, and Jimmy Reed. Cooper was central in launching several of the first folk and blues venues outside London, especially in and around Reading. He was a regular on John Peel's program from 1969-1975, recording numerous sessions. His free music group The Recedents was formed in 1982, threading directly into London vibrant improvisation community. He moved to Italy in 1988 after a slew of musical projects during the '80s in the UK and EU. Since 1994 he has spent increasing amounts of time touring and exploring Oceania. One of the outcomes of his exploration is Beach Crossings-Pacific Footprints -- a radiophone work commissioned by Italian and Australian radio -- that traces the history of colonization in the Pacific by Europeans from Tahiti up to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. His recordings have been re-issued numerous times by labels across the globe. Original pressings are found for obscene prices via various outlets. White Shadows in the South Seas is his latest offering and follows up directly from his lauded Rayon Hula album. It's a pacific sunset-like dream spanning the horizon in pulsing waves of richly-colored rhythms, tropical sound fields and pacific-inspired slide guitar.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
QBICO 091LP
|
Recorded in NYC, 2000. "Live At The Hint House might be considered a field recording in as much as it is a recording of an ambience or soundscape. Made on my first ever trip to mainland America to play music this is the 2nd set of that evening, the 1st set had been an acoustic one of songs and slide guitar. At the start of the 2nd set I quickly realized that my guitar was not working and rather than stop and attempt to find out what was wrong I decided to just continue and improvise with what was at hand on the table in front of me. A Casio SK1 sampler keyboard, a Yamaha SU10 sampling unit with some pre-recorded samples loaded, a mini disc with some tropical ambience rec. from Malaysia and a pitch shifter delay pedal. I was not very happy with what happened that night and when Matt Zwed gave me two CD-Rs the next day I don't remember giving much attention to the 2nd set. Five years on, coincidently to the day as I write this, I realized he had captured more than me trying to get through the piece. It was me, the people in the room, the dog that ran around barking, the traffic sounds coming through the door that was open right behind me and a whole host of magically transported tropical birds and insects that suddenly found themselves reciting whatever it was in the loft space on the edge of Harlem, competing or colluding with all of the above to produce a piece of urban exotica." -- Mike Cooper
|
viewing 1 To 13 of 13 items
|
|