Mike Cooper

In the past some reviewers and critics of my series of Ambient / Electronic / Exotic releases mentioned Jon Hassell and even suggested that we should make an album together. That never happened of course and probably never would have. An influence of his music on my exotica music is in some ways true but initially to be honest it was the cover art by Mati Klarwein for Aka/ Darbari/ Java and Dream Theory in Malaya that I would sometimes turn to look at for inspiration. They reminded me of places t…

Mike Cooper returns to Discrepant with »The Dream Island of Birds«. Neither documentary nor abstraction, »The Dream Island of Birds« sits between field recording, memory, and invention — an island heard through time and circuitry. In the early 1990s, Cooper met illustrator and writer Charles van Sandwyk while walking on a small island in Fiji. Van Sandwyk was living there quietly, working from a modest bamboo house near the beach. Years later, Cooper learned that following a serious car accident…

1997 release **

Slow Motion Lightning; deadly and unpredictable never strikes twice in the same place except when it does.

Nestled beside the sea and a cluster of palm trees, La Malvarrosa, the neighborhood in Valencia where Cooper resides, derives its name from a fusion of "Malva," meaning mauve, and "Rosa," meaning pink. Here, La Malvarrosa serves as the primary backdrop for the recordings, symbolizing two distinct colors and artistic approaches. These hues become the emblematic colors of a fictitious flag from an imagined island located on a forgotten expanse of ocean. From this ethereal site, melodies emerge, se…

Presenting the second thematic volume on the »Aquapelagos« series - a collection of split LPs where selected artists offer their own take into water surrounded cultures and communities. After the initial release of the Anthology compilation Aquapelago in 2022 (Discrepant ,CREP91) and the split LP Atlantico by Lagoss & Banha da Cobra (Keroxen, KRXN027) we proudly introduce an unique collaboration in the series in the shape of no other than two improvising giants, Mike Cooper and Pierre Bastien. T…

*2023 stock* Sampler of some of the most iconic figures in the British jazz scene. Comes with a book of 92 pages that contains the artist' profiles, brief history of British jazz and related discography. Notes on each track written by the composers. English/Italian text.

Temporary nice price Originally released in 2005 on 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 masterfull…

Incomparable bluesman Mike Cooper marks over 50 years of deadly cool and restless experimentation with a masterful melange of free jazz, Oceanic, and Hawaiian inspirations in his umpteenth hallucinatory collage

* Limited Edition of 75 numbered copies. *  This release is dedicated to the video works of Mike Cooper, a cosmopolitan figure of which musically it seems superfluous to say. From bluesman of the first hour, to improviser/ experimenter of the European (and not) more interesting scene, to proponent of a sort of experimental exotica that has become, over time, his trademark. But, instead of the well-known and represented musician and sound artist, this publication offers, in two DVDs for almost 3 …

** Edition of 300 ** Acoustic nylon strung guitar is not something I usually play but a visit by Duck Baker to our home in Rome inspired me to dig out my Brazilian version. I met Duck at Stefan Grossman’s house in the late seventies and embarrassed myself by replying to his question about what did i play by answering "you probably wouldn't understand", assuming he only played folk music. He produced from his bag and gave me a copy of a record with him, Henry Kaiser, Eugene Chadbourne, Owen Maerc…

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 …

The UK’s network of crumbling sound mirrors - an early form of radar - supply cues for blues experimenter Mike Cooper and pivotal improvisor Mark Wastell (Company) in an inquisitive collaboration on Wastell’s Confront Recordings. The strange, austere relics of WWI were erected between 1916 and the 1930s and are found dotted along the South East and North East coastline of England, sometimes in farmer’s fields who’ll let you in for a look if you ask nicely (out to my guy in Boulby).With Cooper ma…

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 gu…

Sharing their vision over lengthy living room guitar sessions and evenings of cold wine in Fado taverns, Gunn and Mike Cooper created Cantos de Lisboa, an album with variable vernacular shades and musical forms from Portugal’s antiquity. Cantos means “corner” in Portuguese, as well as “chant” or “song” (this latter meaning evolved from the Latin antecedent referring to stanzas of verse in poetry). For two artists whose roots lie in the country blues and its subverted offshoots, the proverbial “c…

Courtesy of the same folks who reissued that crazy 'Killing Melody' LP comes an amazing outing from British bluesman Mike Cooper. Since the early 60s he's been active supporting American blues artists such as Jimmy Reed, and Howling Wolf on their UK tours besides earning a crust backing many homegrown R&B bands. He also mastered the steel blues and Hawaiian lap guitar before veering into more avant-garde territory during the 80s, consolidating his various styles into a unique sound. The tracks h…

**Limited edition of 200 copies only on black vinyl**A new Mike Cooper release is always a great event, and we are so happy to have it here! Distant Songs of Madmen was recorded live in Palermo and was my solo set in a concert organised by Lelio Gianetti and Curva Minore which included my trio 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 piec…

It's 2018 and it's time for some new discoveries into Mike Cooper's limitless exploration in his collection of guitars. The title itself, Tropical Gothic references Cooper's beloved areas of "the South" with a Gothic, dark, remote interplay... he explains: ''Tropical Gothic includes, but is by no means limited to, a reflection on a region where European colonial powers fought intensively against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources.'' On each side, Mike…

Mike Cooper's Blue Guitar is a collection that first appeared on Cooper's Hipshot CDr label in 2010 in a limited edition. It is presented here on Idea Records, for the first time on vinyl. Upon its initial release Cooper wrote: "For the past couple of years I have been collating a body of text culled (mostly) from Thomas Pynchon's novels Gravity's Rainbow and V and making cut-up collage pieces in the spirit of William Burroughs, Kurt Schwitters, Tom Phillips and others. Those two particular nove…

Taximi is the improvisation during the performance of traditional musical pieces, using soloistic folk instruments. It has roots in the eastern Mediterranean and Arabic culture and can be commonly found in Greek music and specifically in rebetiko. Taximi is a free rhythm melody, an author's imagination, alternating between various emotional paths with a passion respective to each one who carries it. The main prerequisite in order to play a taximi is not to have excellent technical knowledge, but…

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 z…

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. The music moves very slowly through four movements: ‘’Reluctant Swimmer’’, ‘’Movies is Magic’’, ''Virtual Surfer’’ and ‘’Dolphins’’. '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 says 'the first half is p…

2015 Reissue. With the oddly evocative choice of his third solo album’s title, appropriated from Richard Brautigan’s 1967 surrealist-pastoral novel Trout Fishing in America, Mike Cooper might very well have been describing his own mercurial musical practice. “Trout Steel” suggests a reflective, highly mutable, quicksilver riverine element, an apt metaphor for the lap steel runs summoned from his trademark National resophonic guitars and his restless, constantly evolving development as a singer, …

After two years of tireless work to liberate these long out-of-print masterpieces from the vaults, Paradise of Bachelors is proud to present the first artist-sanctioned reissues—and first-ever vinyl reissues—of iconoclastic English-born, Rome-based folk and experimental music legend Mike Cooper’s classic trio of early 1970s avant-folk/rock records: Trout Steel (1970), Places I Know (1971), and The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper (1972). The latter two titles are presented for the very first tim…

Discrepant presents the first ever vinyl release of Kiribati, the very first instalment in the acclaimed Ambient Exotica Soundscapes by veteran English experimentalist Mike Cooper. ''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, el…

receding the Killing Melody LP by ten years, this EP was recorded by Mike in the late '90s and originally released on his own CDr label Hipshot. A 500 only pressing, these are the last remaining copies. Mike Cooper is a British blues legend. In the early 60s he supported John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Howling Wolf, Son House and many more American blues artists on their UK visits - as well as backing British R&B bands. He honed his guitar skills to later include steel blues and Hawaiian lap …

Fratello Mare, which takes its title from Folco Quilici's classic 1975 film, continues UK-born, Italy-based musician Mike Cooper's ode to the Pacific, its people, and the traditions that have flowed from that part of the world into seemingly endless iterations within contemporary culture. Recorded across 2014, the tropical opus dovetails neatly with Cooper's other Room40 editions, White Shadows in the South Seas (RM 454CD, 2013) and the post-everything classic Rayon Hula (2004). It expands h…

New album from Mike Cooper recorded live on Radio Lebanon in Beirut. Cooper plays electric lap steel and sings several of his 'Spirit Songs' - a body of vocal works that he has been presenting live over the past few years. These 'songs' are constructed by chopping up - (William Burroughs /Brion Gysin/Tom Phillips style) - Gravity's Rainbow and V - two novels by Thomas Pynchon. No chords, melodies or harmonic patterns for each song are planned prior to them being performed. Both accompanime…

For the past fifty years, Mike Cooper has been constantly experimenting with live composition, field recordings and free improvisation; in the late 90s he developed a particular kind of contemporary exotica inspired by his trips in the Pacific area; the result is, in his own words, an “imaginary, exotic, ambient soundscape of places that didn't exist”.“New Globe Notes” collects material previously released on Mike Cooper's own imprint Hipshot Records, and is accompanied by a 32 paged bookl…

Live at the Hint House might be considered a field rec. 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 realised 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 …

It’s this musical whisper that is amplified on Oceanic Feeling-Like, as Italian based musician Mike Cooper and Australia’s Chris Abrahams unite for the first time to create what could be described as a picturesque horizon of melodic ocean swell. Stretching out wide, Oceanic Feeling-Like is generously coloured by Cooper’s unique approaches to the guitar and Abrahams' distinctive piano motions. Both bring a wealth of technique and improvised flare, creating a series of island-like compositions tha…

Mike Cooper: For the past 40 has been an international musical explorer, performing and recording, solo and in a number of inspired groupings and a variety of genres. Initially a folk-blues guitarist and singer songwriter his work has diversified to include improvised and electronic music, live music for silent films, radio art and sound installations. He is also a music journalist, writing features for magazines, particularly on Pacific music and musicians, a visual artist, film and video maker…