![](/../../../brain/images/mike_cooper-spirit_songs.jpg)
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.