Disc of the Day - Mike Cooper - New Globe Notes on No-FI Recording (2014)

Mike Cooper is an original, a true eccentric, unique artists whose artistic life is more than fifty years long... he played with many, many around... blues, americana, exotica, loops and drones, avantgarde, free improvisation and solo and duets and trios...

I fell in love many years ago when I saw him playing and singing with Stefan Grossman and the late, great Sam Mitchell, in London (at Half Moon, Putney) in early '80s... his voice and guitar playing was so natural.

I randomly followed him and his new and newer efforts in Rome, Italy, with his Hipshot CD-R label and his unconventional use of his National Duolian resonator guitar... looping and layering and layering sounds from his trips in the Pacific islands and more.

I yesterday got his limited edition vinyl disc "New Globe Notes" where he - WOW! - stopped the clock with his seldom heard music, recorded on 4 tracks cassette tape and mini-disk recorders between 1999 and 2001, accompanied by a nice, enlightening booklet where Mike opens the world of his very inspirations, books, novels, places...

The "For Mike Cooper" foreword written by David Toop touches and moves, as he uses the words every artist would like to read about himself...

"In a museum without walls they (Mike's sounds and music)  occupy the room labelled Machines for Unscrolling Scenes from Hypnogogic Moments Between Somnolence and Sleep, each one displayed for close inspection as a slippage of mere seconds yet artfully seeming to repeat endlessly yet return in diverse iterations like masks advancing, the face transforming yet always the same face, illumination and shadow moulding the features into a crows of grotesque, coming forward out of the field of singing as if a creature floating through fireflies..."

Images, redefining the concept of exotica, from Les Baxter in 1952 to Martin Denny in 1957 efforts.

A nice adding to my collection and, again, a clock-stopping disc.

Thanks, MANY thanks to Mike Cooper for being one of the younger 72 years old individuals I'm aware of.

What an artist, folks!