Here’s another recent record of the very fine Mike Cooper, one of England’s hidden treasures. Ten years ago I was only dimly half-aware of his status as a performer and recording artist when we stumbled across Metal Box, his 2005 album on the Italian Rossbin label – but at least I remembered to be impressed by his innovative improvising techniques and his sound. Even Steve Pescott, reviewing White Shadows In The South Seas, hardly believed his own senses when he learned that Cooper had been making folky-prog LPs since 1970. I was intrigued enough to purchase two excellent reissues in 2014 (from the American label Paradise of Bachelors), including 1970’s Trout Steel, an uncategorisable item of songs which featured contributions from UK jazz greats such as Alan Skidmore, Roy Babbington, and Mike Osborne. In fact, Cooper’s career goes even further back – his first record was made in 1964 – but it’s his thirst for “restless experimentation” (selon the press notes) that has led him into the worlds of free improvisation and extended techniques.
On Forbidden Delta Planet Blues (LINEAR OBSESSIONAL RECORDINGS LOR 066), we have two long tracks; the title track is created using tape loops and a Hawaiian slide guitar, and it’s a very satisfying listen. Mesmerising yet unsettling, there’s a constant stream of invention going on in every looped riff, that somehow builds on the idea of Beefheart’s Magic Band playing “Venusian swamp blues” (copyright Byron Coley). Cooper goes further than Beefheart; he incorporates ideas about electro-acoustic music, creating impossible alien sounds live in the studio; and his use of repeats and echoes here is a strong match for Terry Riley’s technique, for example when playing Persian Surgery Dervishes. Uncanny.
The second track, ‘The Pain Was Bad, But The Tuna Good’, is a more discursive live recording from 2014, all performed with a single Resonator steel guitar and Cooper’s voice interjecting shouts, free-form poetry, and the odd bellow. No loops, no repeats; the grand design is hard to follow. Like Keith Rowe, he uses the electric fan on the instrument; like Jimmy Page and others, he bows the guitar. What results is very far from recognisable as improvised music, and it seems to occupy a unique niche which only Mike Cooper can reach, a dimension of his own making. Part of this might be his deep connection to his own folk roots; his spontaneous singing here will make you rush back to albums by Roy Harper or Roger Chapman for some light relief. But he’s grown his own distinctive form of performed music too. I thought this label’s previous Mike Cooper release Right (H)ear Side by Side contained some resemblances to Tangerine Dream, and here again Cooper manages (probably without even trying) to replicate the more extreme end of Krautrock and Kosmische music, such as Cluster or the darker moments of Faust, using only a guitar. Yet he also does so in a very understated way, with tremendous attention to nuances of sound and micro-changes in timbre. Plus there’s his unstinting imagination and continual invention; never one to fall asleep or let a performance sag, he finds changes of direction and unexplored avenues that nobody but himself could ever have seen coming.
An extremely impressive document. Only 50 copies of the CDR were made, but the published download will be around for as long as the internet persists, I suppose. Arrived here 22 October 2015.