Mike Cooper is a difficult artist to situate, straddling as he doesseveral radically different musical spheres. There is thesinger-songwriter of the 1960s, working in a traditional folk-bluesvein alongside legends like Son House, Bukka White and John LeeHooker. There is the free-improvising maverick of the 70s,producing genre-defying free-folk-jazz with improv luminaries such asKeith Rowe, David Toop and Max Eastley. Then there is the mostrecent phase of Cooper's career, producing idiosyncratic modern exoticacombining his passions for Hawaiian lap-steel guitar with fieldrecordings, dusty record loops and forays into drone and noise.Hipshot
In the past, I've made the case for Mike Cooper as a unique and largelyunderappreciated voice in modern music (read my previous reviews here and here),and these two new CD-Rs on the artist's own Hipshot label present yetmore evidence of Cooper's willingness to push out the boundaries of hisart. Spirit Songs attempts a complex synthesis of the three approaches mentioned above - song, improv and loops; while Giacintois an understated tribute to Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi, afascinating tangent into abstract guitar drone. Once again, bothalbums are limited, handmade CD-Rs available exclusively from theartist himself, who suggests putting cash inside a birthday card andsending it to his address in Rome.
Spirit Songs is my favorite of the pair: a glorious marriage ofall three of Cooper's previous musical strategies; creating a stunninghybrid. The album contains 10 songs performed on fingerpickedacoustic and electric lap steel guitar, often looped and treated inreal 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 anintuitive, idiosyncratic form of folk-blues, with Cooper narratinglaments over matters personal and global, gentle universalisms thatdouble as political messages. All of this occurs over a looserhythmic framework provided by various noisy loops, with cracks,scratches and pops, echoes and distortions skipping out from everyrefrain. It's a gentle cacophony with subtle undercurrents ofbeauty and sadness, effortlessly nostalgic but still very rooted in thenow. I think that Mike Cooper can genuinely call this style hisown; I've never heard anything remotely like it, and it worksbeautifully, highlighting both song and singer, as well as the happyaccidents resulting from the intersection of structure and chaos. Most tracks seem to be recorded live to tape, with the title trackcoming from a live performance in front of an audience. In asense, Cooper prepared us for this direction with the unexpectedintrustion of song into his otherwise shambolic live CD-R Reluctant Swimmer/Virtual Surfer released last year, but Spirit Songs fully fleshes out the ideas only briefly glimpsed in that performance.
Giacinto represents yet another new approach from Cooper, thistime using the specific sound archicture of his National tri-plateresophonic guitar, exploring the sound produced on open strings with ahandheld battery-operated electric fan. This produces acontinuous note, not unlike an e-bowed electric guitar, but on theNational tri-plate acoustic it produces strange overtones and complexharmonics that shift, bend and mutate as the fan is applied atdifferent angles to differente combinations of strings. Thisresults in a suite of strikingly unique drone pieces which have aspecific alien resonance that immediately sets them apart from mostother drone musics produced with analog or digital methods. Ofcourse, Cooper cannot help but fill out these drone compositions withhis live-sampling and looping techniques, producing several long-formpieces that gradually build up layers of hypnotic drone at differenttones and pitches, building up an immersive sonic atmosphere that attimes reminded me of Sublime Frequencies' Broken Hearted Dragonflies CDof "insect electronica" recorded in Southest Asia. The differencehere is that Cooper makes his insects buzz, hum and sing along with hisincredible improvisatory instinct; only occasionally does the joke wearthin on Giacinto, which is a lot more than I can say for many other current groups producing low-tech drone.
Sometimes it can seem—especially to people like me who write aboutmusic and receive thousands of flimsy CD-R demos and promos everymonth—that recording and releasing music has become almost too easyand democratic these days, leading to an underground market floodedwith homegrown crap that would have been better left languishing on thebedroom floor. An artist like Mike Cooper, however, with hiswillingly unprofressional and strictly uncommercial home operation, isproducing amazing music to rival the best of the current critical"canon" of experimental music, can restore my faith in the newdemocracy of the digital age.
Spirit Songs samples:
Giacinto samples:
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