Mike Cooper
Influential British guitarist Mike Cooper is primarily regarded as a folk-blues guitarist and singer/songwriter, though his wide range of work cannot be so easily defined. He is also a celebrated improviser and electronic musician. In addition, he creates sound installations and radio art; he\'s a videographer, journalist, and music historian; and he performs scores for silent films.
Influential British guitarist Mike Cooper is primarily regarded as a folk-blues guitarist and singer/songwriter, though his wide range of work cannot be so easily defined. He is also a celebrated improviser and electronic musician. In addition, he creates sound installations and radio art; he\'s a videographer, journalist, and music historian; and he performs scores for silent films.
Aquapelagos Vol.2: Índico
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…
Elastic Jazz - Sketches Of Britain
*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.
Spirit Songs (LP)
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…
Black Flamingo
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
Oceans Of Milk And Treacle
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 personne…
Island Gardens (BOX : 2 Dvd + Book + Inserts)
* 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 …
Cumino in Mia Cucina
** 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
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 …
Sound Mirrors
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…
Oh Really!?
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…
FRKWYS Vol. 11: Cantos De Lisboa
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…
World Slide
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…
Distant Songs of Madmen
**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…
Tropical Gothic
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…
Blue Guitar
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…
London Taximi
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…
Raft
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…
Reluctant Swimmer / Virtual Surfer
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…
Trout Steel
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, …
Places I Know / The Machine Gun Co.
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…