Label: Eargong Records - EG02

オリジナルは2005年に自主レーベルHipshotより極小リリースしたCD-R作品[Spirit Songs]がリマスター仕様でヴァイナル化！！60年代より今尚様々な形態の実験演奏を続けるブリティッシュ・フォーク/ブルースの重鎮ギタリストMike Cooper。現行のスタイルでも確認出来る予め用意されたバックトラックに合わせ演奏を重ねていく実験エキゾチカな内容となっており、穏やかな流れの中にも随所に混沌とした構造が出現。一部の歌詞はトマス・ピンチョンの小説からカットアップされている模様。マスト。







Recorded at The Steelworks-Rome and at Viv Corringham's flat in The Angel,London, November 2005. I arrived in London with some pre-recorded backing tracks and overdubbed the vocals and some guitar onto a mini disc. It appeared as Hipshot cdr 016 in 2005. Remixed for this version. This was the first time in many years that I recorded some of my own songs and it was the beginning of a series exploring sung lyrics across improvised electro acoustic backing, something I then pursued as a live concert presentation.The texts were expanded over the years using cut-ups of Thomas Pynchon's two novels, Gravity's Rainbow and V. There are many live recorded versions of Spirit Songs, everyone of them musically different. This was the first and I continue to present them.

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"Spirit Songs.. a glorious marriage of all three of Cooper's previous musical strategies; creating a stunning hybrid. The album contains 10 songs performed on fingerpicked acoustic and electric lap steel guitar, often looped and treated in real time, with Cooper singing lyrics in a quietly meandering, semi-improvisatory manner that recalls a more polished Jandek. The style of songwriting is immediately recognizable as blues, but an intuitive, idiosyncratic form of folk-blues, with Cooper narrating laments over matters personal and global, gentle universalisms that double as political messages. All of this occurs over a loose rhythmic framework provided by various noisy loops, with cracks, scratches and pops, echoes and distortions skipping out from every refrain. It's a gentle cacophony with subtle undercurrents of beauty and sadness, effortlessly nostalgic but still very rooted in the now. I think that Mike Cooper can genuinely call this style his own; I've never heard anything remotely like it, and it works beautifully, highlighting both song and singer, as well as the happy accidents resulting from the intersection of structure and chaos."- Pitchfork Review.