A Q&A with Mike Cooper
"Others express rage and anger in a different way, musically. My way is quiet."
Sometime midway through 2020 I found Mike Cooper’s Rayon Hula. Originally released in 2005, and then reissued by Room40 in 2019, I kept it on repeat all that summer. In those days I avoided music that reminded me of anything too solid — that is, minimal lyrics, no formal songwriting structure.
As with much of Cooper’s music, the tone of Rayon Hula activates (for me, anyway) a kind of meditative state, but its textures prevent it from becoming background noise. In other words: It lets you turn on, tune in and drop out. As I wrote in a previous post,
…Rayon Hula is, at times, quite eerie. Insects buzz and frogs chirp and the weather shifts into something humid and foreboding and there’s no telling what’s around the next bend in the river. Rayon Hula almost imperceptibly blurs the lines between natural and man-made sound. It takes you somewhere else.
Born in Reading, Berkshire, in 1942, Cooper started playing guitar as a teenager and by the 1960s was a fixture in England’s blues and folk clubs. Never one to settle into genre conventions, he connected the dots between blues guitar and Hawaiian guitar — they share the “glissando sound,” gliding from one pitch to the next — and started playing around with slack-key and steel guitars. Not that any of it was ever a straight line: Cooper hopped around “[f]rom Blues and Folk to singer songwriter in avant rock bands to free improvised music, reggae, a Hawaiian band, No Wave, New Wave, etc etc.”
In the mid-'90s Cooper began his travels across the Island Nations of the Pacific, Australia, and South East Asia. He drew on the ambiance of those places (“Australian birds are scarily creative” he writes in the Rayon Hula reissue liner notes), folding nature into his atmospheric, electronic neo-exotica sound.
It’s difficult to get one’s arms around Cooper’s oeuvre: He’s stunningly productive, and consistently releases new music on Bandcamp. His work is inspired by literature, film, new instruments and current events. Direct themes emerge: Playing with Water and Kiribati, for example, address climate crisis and raising sea levels.
The ocean is a constant source of inspiration, Cooper tells me, but he has a love/hate relationship with water. I ask him to elaborate, he tells me that when he was born the nurse thought he was dead.
“However a more experienced midwife came by, grabbed me by my feet and plunged me heard first into cold water,” he writes in an email. “It was so cold and such a shock that I gasped and proceeded to breath.
“I never went near water much after that until we went to the Pacific,” he adds. “Now we live by the sea and go every morning when we can.”
Cooper, who lives in Valencia, Spain, was kind enough to answer some questions via email. Very minor edits have been made for clarity.
You’re releasing When a Screaming Comes Across the Sky on August 1st, can you tell me a bit about your approach to that record musically? What sort of artistic itch is it scratching in relation to, say, Eternal Equinox which you released just a couple of months ago?
My approach to my records, or whatever we are calling them these days, releases maybe, are two fold. Either live recordings or studio collages. Eternal Equinox started out as an exercise in improvising with my virtual pedal steel, which is an app that I have in all my iOS devices. They turned into more complex pieces eventually when I collaged them with more textures.
Musically Equinox and Screaming are not that different. They are constructed the same way. I am a collagist and I have all these digital files that I make and I put them together, a bit like pasting bits of paper to make a collage. I sit and improvise with various instruments or apps and make pieces and then when the time comes I have these folders with them in and I can choose which one I think goes with which to make a composition. Unless it’s live of course. My live concerts are kind of the same but different in that I have to make decisions about the piece as it progresses. Most of it is improvised live although I might use some pre-prepared rhythm tracks sometimes.
I make visual collages as well, both paper and digital, the same way. I recently had a book of some of my photo-collage pieces called FotoGRAFIX published in Italy and we had a presentation of the book in a gallery with an exhibition of some of my recent digital visual works and I gave a short concert using just my iPhone.
The title that I give a piece of course might suggests some kind of kind of thought that I might have had during or after the making of a piece. An Eternal Equinox is an impossible phenomenon of course. Equal night and day forever could never happen but it also implies some kind of balance or harmony. Screaming was a deliberate statement of my frustration and anger at the present state of the world particularly in the near east.
Others express rage and anger in a different ways, musically. My way is quiet. Loud voices often have no content in my view. Contemplation of the music, bearing in mind the title of a piece, might reveal its inner meaning for me, and hopefully for others.
You dedicate the new record to Thomas Pynchon and (to paraphrase) all victims of war in your lifetime. Can you elaborate on your relationship to Pynchon’s work in general and how it surfaced in this release specifically?
This is a long answer. I have been a fan of Thomas Pynchon’s work since the mid-1970’s when Gravity’s Rainbow was first published. It took me a long time to read it because it was my travel-only book. I was a singer songwriter for a number of years until an album called Life And Death In Paradise released in 1974. I retired for a while after that record and reviewed my relationship with the music business and my work. I no longer felt the desire to write songs from a personal point of view.
I was living in Spain and Germany and through various magazines and journals I came across the work of visual artists, film makers and musicians also previously unknown to me. A British artist Tom Phillips had just released a book called The Humument. He had purchased a cheap Victorian novel and had meticulously gone through it randomly marking words and phrases which when highlighted by decorating the rest of the page and obscuring the unwanted text rendered up some poetry. William Burroughs and Brion Gysin had done similar work of a ‘cut up’ kind of course. I decided this could be a fruitful way to proceed and I began to work, first of all with Gravity’s Rainbow and with Pynchon’s other novel V, to produce random selections of text. I called them Spirit Songs. I never did much with them for many years because I couldn’t find a musically satisfactory way of presenting them.
I was working with free improvising musicians from about 1980, particularly in a trio called The Recedents, with saxophone player Lol Coxhill and drummer Roger Turner, and there were singer/voice artists working in that scene but mostly in an abstract fashion; none of them using text or songs and I didn’t feel I had anything that would contribute to that area. So my Spirit Songs would have to wait.
In 2003/4 I came across two records that I still listen to now and again. One was Wrapped Island by Christian Fennesz and Polwechsel and the other was Too Beautiful To Burn by Martin Siewert and Martin Brandlmayr. It was very minimal music and it struck me that this was music that one could sing across the top of because it had no tonal centre and was very textural, quiet and slow and it inspired me to try to make something similar. but on my own I started to make some backing tracks along similar lines without imitating them in any way and I took the tracks and two mini discs to London where my friend Viv Corringham had left her apartment vacant.
I sang some of the text that I had made across the backing tracks (which I still have) and this became my first Spirit Songs edition released on my Hipshot cdr label in 2005. I didn’t have a computer that could be used for music at that time and so my work was very Lo-Fi and time consuming but creatively rewarding.
“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” Those are the opening words of Gravity’s Rainbow which is set during World War Two, when I was born, and refers to the V2 rocket that Germany invented and launched against the UK at that time. It was considered a deadly weapon but compared with military munitions now it was almost deadly fireworks. The V2 was hypersonic and you never heard it coming. Now sound is used as much as a weapon as munitions.
There is a long story of me meeting Udo Breger on a festival in Heidelberg. Udo worked with William Boroughs and Brion Gysin and is a writer and part of the European Beat Studies Network, that’s Beats as in poets and writers not dance beats; and we we got talking in the breakfast room of our hotel about Thomas Pynchon. It turned out he was a fan as well. He asked me how old I was and it turned out he is a year older than me. He is German and he suddenly said ‘The rocket connects us then!!’ It took me a moment to realise he meant the V2 rocket which connected us as babies and Gravity’s Rainbow. I have a much longer story concerning Udo but maybe another time.
It seems to me that part of what makes your music consistently energized and vital is your awareness of and engagement with what's going on in the world, be it climate change or colonialism or (as referenced above) endless war. Does your work function as a way for you to process your own grief surrounding global catastrophe?
Yes I am a musician and not a conceptual artist or even a ‘sound artist’ really. I have no academic background and I have no thesis at the back of whatever I am doing written in some convoluted university/ art school speak. You don’t have to read anything I might write about what I do to enjoy it, I hope, even though I do often write some background to some of the recordings that I make, but hopefully [that’s written] in plain language. My work is often inspired by whatever I am reading and thinking about at the time and any titles are a way of maybe encouraging people to perhaps read past the music. What does that title mean Playing With Water for example? If you Google it you might discover a novel written by James Hamilton Patterson about living alone on an island in the Philippines.
How much do you think about the listener's experience when you're making a record? For example, are records like Kiribati or Playing with Water primarily made with the intent of raising awareness of climate disaster? Do listeners' reactions ever surprise you? In other words, do you ever witness your music taking on unexpected meaning once it's released into the world?
They are made with the vain hope of making a difference in some way. I dont think music itself can change much without words. Songs might be useful in that direction but to be honest I hardly ever get into that kind of conversation with people about my music. Every now and then a critic in a review might come up with some angle on it that I had not thought about. Most of what I do is very ‘ambient’ and so hopefully maybe its calming and relaxing but with interesting detail.
Reading through some old interviews, literature is a major influence on your work. What were some of the first books that you felt spoke to you as an artist, and how did you see it start to integrate into your music?
Three of the first books from my childhood days that would appear to have influenced me and would crop up as an influence one way or another much later in my musical life were The Tempest by Shakespeare, The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley and The Kon Tiki Expedition. The Tempest is a play with a lot of music and songs and references to sound in it. It is set on an island and has been interpreted as a critique of England’s colonisation of other places.
The Water Babies was read to me by my mother who also coloured the illustrations in the copy we had with water colours as she read. I later in life realised she had been a watercolorist in her early years. The story is a very moral one and again a critique against child labour and a story of escape and redemption.
The Kon Tiki, as everyone knows I think, is the story of Thor Heyerdahl and his crew who sailed a balsa wood raft across the Pacific Ocean from Peru hoping to prove that the Polynesian islands were discovered and settled by people from South America. The Kon Tiki got as far as the Tuamotu islands in French Polynesia and his theory was wrong. Polynesians came from the west across the Pacific and not the east and they did not drift they were expertly sailed. Suggesting that they drifted is a form of racism with the presumption that those people did not have the means or knowledge to sail without modern technology.
He was wrong. They knew how to read the stars and the wind and water and knew how to discover new islands that lay beyond their immediate visual horizon. The book that inspired Kiribati is A Pattern Of Islands by Arthur Grimble. He was a British Colonial Governor in The Ellis and Gilbert Islands from 1926-33 in what became the Kiribati Islands. It is one of many books he wrote about Kiribati and Polynesian art and culture. It was through these books and through the fact that my main instrument was the Hawaiian Lap Steel guitar that my preoccupation with islands and island culture in general and the Ocean came about.
We have a big library. “Slow Motion Lightning” was inspired by The Guyana Quartet a book written by Wilson Harris. I read it and when I had finished I thought ‘I have no idea what I just read.’ It is a very strange and psychedelic book. Sometimes the characters are both dead and alive at the same time and living in parallel time spaces. All of the titles of my pieces on the record are lines taken from the book. It is part of a larger body of Caribbean literature of which I am very fond.
The African sensibility embodied appeals to me. I am a fan of the poet Kamau Brathwaite, another writer from Barbados. I have a special corner in my heart for the Caribbean people. Reading, where I was born and grew up, had a very early considerable population of folks from there and around 1957/ 58 I had a friend Johnny who was from Barbados. He was probably the same age as me but seemed older and wiser. He played guitar sang Hank Williams songs and that was the first time i ever heard Hank Williams. Later at the end of the 1970s early '80s when I returned to live in Reading again I socialised with the Caribbean community and began to appreciate Reggae and Dub music and again that Caribbean sensibility which has stayed with me. Jon Hassell had some thoughts about it and he was writing a book about the north and the south of the globe and of the body when he spoke about Forth World music.
What are you reading now?
I just finished reading David Toop’s book Two Headed Doctor, about Dr. John’s recording Gris Gris and Bob Ostertag’s book Encounters With Men. I love both these writer’s books and their music. I also read a lot of Michael Ondaatje’s poetry and I am slowly working my way through Nathaniel Mackey’s three volume set Double Trio a monumental work similar, in my mind, to the films of Las Diaz that are rarely less than three hours long. All of these writers have music running through their work one way or another.
I read that Henry Kaiser’s Hope You Like Our New Direction inspired you to push the boundaries of genre in your work. Can you talk about how it felt to have that realization and how you went about indulging that newly realized freedom?
I have an eclectic background in music starting out as a folk and blues singer guitarist in the late 1950’s and moving though a variety of genre. From Blues and Folk to singer songwriter in avant rock bands to free improvised music, reggae, a Hawaiian band, No Wave, New Wave, etc etc. Suddenly Henry, who I was aware of as an improvising guitarist, released Hope You Like Our New Direction in 1991 which gave me permission to put all of that stuff that I liked and could play into one record. That record of his has a David Essex song “Rock” On alongside a Vietnamese piece; a Hawaiian Slack Key song alongside some free improvisation.
I had been working on and off with singer friend Viv Corringham for several years and she had a similar background in music to me. We had a mutual love of Greek Rembetika as well as free improvisation. When I heard Henry’s record I thought well why not put everything that you like and can do into one record. Things were very compartmentalised in the London improv scene but were beginning to break up and become more inclusive of other styles of music. Groups like Alterations, with David Toop and Steve Beresford, the Japanese band Frank Chickens, people involved in the London Musicians Collective were moving things around in a creative manner, new instrumentation was being included.
The Recedents were part of this movement against orthodoxy. And so Viv and I made Avant Roots and we decided to pool the resources of our musical backgrounds. She is, as I said, from a folk and rock background and is now a respected Deep Listening and Sound Walking artist. Jean Rochard, a French producer and label boss of Nato Records was almost the only record producer interested in recording this new wave of improvisors. Every year he organised a small festival in Chantenay a small village in France where he was from. He booked mostly the British new wave of improvisers as well as French musicians that were also ‘outsiders’ from the jazz scene. He introduced me to a guitarist singer Cyril Lefebvre who he described to me as being ‘a French version of you’ (me).
We in fact discovered we had a mutual love of Pacific Island Culture, exotica music and slide guitarists. Rochard suggested we could make a record together and Cyril and I formed The Uptown Hawaiians with the idea of a hybrid transpacific music played with improvising musicians instead of musicians who were used to playing that style of music. We recorded Avek Lei Uptown Hawaiians for Richards Chabada label. We played just one concert in London but then went on to play in Europe. At one festival in Zurich we augmented the band with several Tahitian dancers and musicians that Cyril knew that were living in Paris.
I then recorded Island Songs, also for Jean Rochard, with a band I put together called Continental Drift. A rhythm section of musicians that I knew from my hometown in England and that I had worked with in various formats in the past; Gary Jones on bass, Simon Price on drums plus Pat Thomas the pianist, Tim Hill on alto saxophone and Geoff Hawkins on tenor. We were augmented on the record by other musicians including Lol Coxhill on saxophone; Flo Petricien from the Reunion Islands on vocals and guitars; Noel Akchote the guitarist amongst them. We played everything from blues that I had written; original songs; reggae; Hawaiian slack key songs; and all played with a spirit of jazz and improvisation.
That was 1996 and was described [in one review] as a mix of Exotic blues and French Cafe Chanson sounding Hawaiian. I had travelled around the Pacific to Tahiti, Fiji, Hawaii and other places by then and had come back with a lot of musical and political thoughts and influences some of which translated to music on the record.
Do you ever feel stuck or burnt out in your work? And if so, do you have any method or practice that allows you to move past artistic blockage?
Sometimes a new instrument, or an old one that has not been used for a while can revive interest or, especially lately, a new digital piece of equipment or a new app that has to be explored for its potential. In order to reduce my equipment when travelling recently I have been investigating and using apps in small digital devices.
I like apps that can actually be played like an instrument. The virtual lap/pedal steel for instance I have been using for a while. I didnt tell anyone what it was for a while because I wanted to observe peoples reaction to it. It was fortunately positive and very few people realised it wasn’t a real guitar and were surprised when I told them.
The sea/beach/ocean is a constant source of inspiration. We live near the beach and I have a kind of love hate relationship with water. Travel always inspires me. Recently we have been in Thailand and Malaysia doing some concerts and holidays. Asia in general inspires me a lot. Meeting new artists out there is always a refreshing revelation. We decided to go to Thailand and Malaysia ( places we had been before) and I put out a call on Facebook that i would be there with a minimal set of instruments and if anyone knew of places to play I would be available. i had wonderful response and met some other musicians and organisers that I would never have met any other way and played some great small venues including a record shop in Kuala Lumpur. The view of the world from the global south is a lot different than from the global north.
You're so prolific, do you ever go back and listen to your older music or are you just anxious to move on to the next thing?
I go back to listen to my own work after a long period has passed since its release. I am often surprised and sometimes I can’t even remember how I did some things. On the guitar I have lost a lot of the technique that I had when I was younger especially playing a different kind of music. When I was playing blues and Hawaiian music for instance but now my music is concerned with other things and different techniques. I have to be careful using samples to make sure I haven’t already used them somewhere else already or go back and see if there is something that might sound interesting re-cycled somehow.
You don't often sing on your records, but I always enjoy when you do. What's your relationship to your voice these days? Do you sing much in your day-to-day life?
That’s a good question that I don’t get asked very often. I started my musical life as a singer not as a guitarist. I never sing at home and I never practise singing. It’s something I do live only these days.
In fact I have made a lot of records with voice on them and I nearly always sing in my live concerts. I rarely record in professional studios these days and a lot of my music is instrumental and recorded at home in my portable studio but singing is, whenever possible, a part of my musical life.
One of the things I love to do is a solo concert with just acoustic guitar and voice, no amplification what-so-ever. Not even a voice microphone. I made a live record like that in Milan in 2018 which is on Paradise Of Bachelors. My Blue Guitar record is just acoustic guitar and voice recorded live in 2010 at my home studio when I lived in Rome.
I made that record in a similar way to to that original Spirit Songs record I mentioned earlier. I improvised and recorded some guitar tracks on a Zoom recorder and then recorded myself singing some of my Spirit Songs text but without listening to the guitar tracks and then I collaged the two together. It’s one of my favourite records and was released on my Hipshot cdr label and then eventually re-released on vinyl on Idea Records. Later this year there will be a cd release of some of the pieces from Blue Guitar but with my guitar removed and replaced by new music played by an Italian musician Giorgio Li Calzi. He has taken my vocals, removed the guitar, and re-located them into his own music. We are going to do some live concerts with this in Italy in November.
Another project using my voice that I like is a CD with Elio Martusciello an Italian electronics musician called Concrete Songs from 2011. He had me sing in his home studio and then took my vocals and placed them into some music he had made. His own music was mostly constructed from hundreds of samples of other peoples music including an orchestra of musicians who would never meet in the real world. It worked very well in my opinion.
I am about to release a four volume set of live recordings of the Spirit Songs. One set is solo and the others are with different groups of musicians who have collaborated with me on the project. The thing about Spirit Songs is they they are different every time I perform them because they have no set form. The music is always improvised and so I can perform them with any musicians as long as they can improvise.
Lastly, have you seen any good movies recently?
Not a lot of people know but one of the favourite things that I do is live music for silent films when the opportunity arises. Something that I began doing more than 30 years ago starting in Australia. I was invited every year for over 20 years to do a cineconcert for the Brunswick Music Festival held annually in Melbourne. So I had to come up with a new film every year. It’s something I did quite a lot when living in Rome as well but rarely got asked to do anywhere else in Europe. One of my CDs on Room40 records is White Shadows In The South Seas and is the soundtrack I made for the film of the same name.
I have a great admiration for early cinema especially the Russian films of say Dziga Vertov / Eisenstein or the German F.W.Murnau. They invented cinema for me. They came up with ways of telling a story without dialogue and they invented cinematic techniques that would not be surpassed for 70 years. I always tried to make my soundtracks as contemporary and experimental as those films were when they were released.
Last year I did a rare screening in Taranto in the south of Italy of a film called L’Inhumain from 1924. The original score, by Darius Milhaud, was meant to be played live to accompany the film but it has been lost. The general opinion was that it was very percussive and so I took that suggestion and I play a soundtrack, mostly improvised, using a lot of electronic drum beats and processed electric lap steel guitar. There is a page on my web site dedicated to silent film. In Rome we went to the cinema often more than twice a week. When I first moved there in 1988 of course I couldn’t speak Italian and most foreign films in Italy are dubbed into Italian. I sat through many films not understanding a word of the dialogue, often falling asleep as well as a result. The Chilean film maker Raul Ruiz said that his favourite film audiences were those that didn’t understand the dialogue or who fell asleep, because in both cases the viewer made up his own story. When the sleeper woke up he had to stitch together what he saw on waking with what he remembered from before he fell asleep.
I am reminded of a quote by Jean Luc Godard here with regards silent films - “We watched silent films in the era of talkies. We dreamed about film. We were like Christians in the catacombs." (from wikipedia). We have our own rooftop projection space here in summer. Nothing fancy just a very cheap projector that I bought in a market in Rome and a set of studio monitors for sound and we project onto a whitewashed wall. So now I am able to go back and watch a lot of those films that I saw first dubbed into Italian in their original language ( with the real voices of the actors) and all the way through without sleeping and I am always pleasantly surprised.
Recent films? Wim Wenders film about the toilet cleaner in Japan is nice. There is a collection of film or video from Palestine called From Ground Zero made by people in Gaza on mobile phones that is great. Khavn De La Cruz from the Philippines is a wild film maker. Mondomanila is good introduction to his style of no budget/low budget film making. He is a musician as well and we have performed live music together to his films and we gave a live cine-concert in Milan playing to the Japanese silent film A Page Of Madness last year.
Jean Luc Godard’s Image Book I liked but I have not seen his last 18 minute film Scenarious. I am a huge fan of anything by Apichatpong Weerasethakul the Thai film maker and also Pedro Costa the Portuguese director. His films about the Cabo Verdian community in Lisbon are pretty amazing I think. Back to the African sensibility again I love Sir John Akomfra’s films. He started the Black Audio Film Collective in London and his films are politically motivated by colonisation. He is of Ghanaian descent. The Stuart Hall Project is a good place to start with his work. It is on YouTube.
I also make film/video and have a pretty big catalogue. A couple of years ago a record company, Ants Records, released a double DVD set of some of my video titled Island Gardens and I always use my video as back projection in my live solo concerts and most of them are all on YouTube. I don’t use sophisticated equipment for anything that I do. My aesthetic is very down home and I don’t believe in paying more for stuff that I have already purchased but cant be bothered to investigate. I make full use of the technology that is already in my pocket.
On a recent trip to Thailand I was investigating the possibility of being able to play electronic music anywhere as long as there was sun and a solar panel to recharge whatever was in my pocket, even the necessary amplification. I had a mini ipad, a Samsung tablet and an iPhone, two mini speakers and a mini mixer. I called it my my DNA tour. Digital Nomadic Art tour. I also had an exhibition of my digital visual art works on a USB that could be printed out at any copy shop and my videos. I need to find a portable battery powered projector next.
For anyone interested I have a considerable amount of work on Bandcamp. I tend to use Bandcamp as a digital library or storage space for records that are not released on vinyl or c.d. especially as record labels can’t cope with releasing the amount of work that I produce and rather than wait for a year or two before something is released I put it on Bandcamp.
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