- Mike Cooper has been making music with his National Resophonic slide guitar for half a century. His resistance to creative complacency, coupled with a tendency to borrow from various traditions, makes his career impossible to pin down. In the early '60s, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards invited him to join the Rolling Stones, but he declined, having already heard the siren call of Ornette Coleman's free jazz. His early '70s works—Trout Steel, Places I Know and The Machine Gun Co. With Mike Cooper—find a sweet spot between free jazz and blues, the Afro-derived foil to Henry Flynt's mix of minimalist composition and Appalachian folk music. Over 40 years later, we find our Hawaiian shirt-wearing protagonist in the midst of his "ambient electronic exotica" series, in which he blends field recordings from his island travels with microtonal slide guitar and textural, electronic soundscapes. On Fratello Mare, these elements come together for a hypnotic travelogue unlike anything else.
Cooper's island records feel like the inverse of the American hypnagogic pop sound. On albums like James Ferraro's Clear and Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics, musicians raised in American suburbs attempted to create music for imaginary, hyperreal beach scenes. Cooper, on the other hand, perceives psychedelia while immersed in real-life tropical travels. While gathering samples for Fratello Mare, he made a handheld recording of students playing xylophones and other metal percussion outside a music school in Bangkok. On "New Gamelan," he loops up bits of their carefree practice sessions, lays the loops on a bed of bird sounds and plays a warped slide-guitar solo over the top. The combination is more rhythmic than you would expect—Cooper has a habit of using drum & bass tracks as source material in his process, not far from what Lee Gamble did with jungle on Diversions 1994-1996.
Though Cooper clearly doesn't care about DJ culture, his output bears a number of similarities to bleeding-edge electronic music. Listen to "Street Beneath The Beach": an insistent bassline and hand percussion create a modern krautrock vibe not far from "Let's Go," the opener off Edward's Into A Better Future. Still, the X-factor here is Cooper's alien guitar performances, which follow Ornette's open-ended harmolodic theory. The experimental "Secret Mexican Beach" builds creepy electronica out of insect field recordings while Cooper riffs ecstatic blues on an acoustic. Conversely, the title track's open major chords, loping electronic bassline and gently plucked steel guitar make a relaxing sound that wouldn't be out of place in a beachside tourist bar.
This music can be intellectualized, a trend Cooper doesn't shun—"Street Beneath The Beach" takes its title from McKenzie Wark's book about Situationist International. That said, Fratello Mare is also a breezy, abstract view into Cooper's tropics. It glides by quickly, like any good vacation.
Tracklist01. On Passing Bamboo
02. A House in Bali
03. Summer Without Waves
04. Street Beneath the Beach
05. Of Palm and Reef
06. Fratello Mare
07. Notes from My Pacific Log
08. Secret Mexican Beach
09. A Cinnamon Peeler
10. New Gamelan
11. Complicated Sky