Mike Cooper isn’t widely known, but to the extent that the wider world has heard of him, it’s for a series of folk-rock albums that veer thrillingly towards free jazz and improvisation. Trout Steel, Places I Know, and T**he Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper were all reissued last year by Paradise of Bachelors, reasserting his place in the canon of exploratory singer-songwriters of the '60s and '70s, people who found unexplored corners on folk songs and pulled on them until they bent into new shapes.
But those albums are a footnote inside the wider, weirder world of Mike Cooper. He also provides live music for silent films, paints and does collage, and releases albums of experimental, loop-based guitar music that sound like tropical-kitsch recordings from the mid-20th century drowning in soup. Fratello Mare is one such album: Cooper’s chosen instrument is a 1930s National Resophonic guitar that he has rigged with a series of effects pedals and loopers. He generates a slightly nauseous, shimmery river of sounds with it, fragments of pearly guitar notes that resemble Hawaiian slack-key guitar floating in a viscous solution filled with chattering incidental noises. On "On Passing Bamboo", there is the woody thunk of some mallet percussion, and in "A House in Bali" some pre-recorded wind chimes loop nightmarishly.
Cooper has a fascination with Pacific culture, with tropical kitsch and folk music (he is a devoted collector of Hawaiian shirts), and the chatter of birds fills the background of almost every piece here, as well as the cries of other animals, while his improvisatory guitar peals quietly. The energy coursing through these warped recordings is that of a strange, terrible dream you might have after a luau. There are field recordings scattered through the album that Cooper made himself on the islands across South East Asia and the Caribbean, and they surface in fragments, sometimes recognizable (the riiip of a motorcycle engine tooling away from us), often not.
Cooper’s music, in any of its forms, seems drunk on the intermingling of folk traditions, searching for a spot between them all that renders the strange familiar and vice versa. He is an improvisatory musician, one who generates his music in sheets, loops, and layers, and he seems to accrete these found-sound albums like a spider spins silk, or a vine grows pumpkins. They just appear, fattened and ripe, the fruits of his memories, travels, and idiosyncrasies.
