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Hipshot
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His long-standinginterest in Hawaiian steel guitar, Pacific culture and exotica reachedits apex last year with the release of his Rayon Hulaalbum, a fascinating experimental work combining dizzying loops fromold Arthur Lyman records with Cooper's impressive improvisation onsteel guitar.
Cooper's new limited CD-R release on his own Hipshotlabel is a recording of an October 2003 live performance at animprovised music festival in Rome. The live set is composed of onelong, slowly evolving piece combining field recordings, real-timesampling, digital treatment and loops with live improvisation onCooper's 1920 National tri-plate lap steel guitar. It's a richlyevocative work that meanders lazily through oceanic expanses ofelectronic twitters and drones, to lush jungle landscapes filled withexotic birds and hypnotic curls of delayed steel guitar. Twice duringthe performance, all of the disparate elements gel unexpectedly intogentle vocal songs.
The first is a cover of Van Dyke Parks' "Movies IsMagic," and Cooper transforms the nostalgic ode to old Hollywood into awarm and nuanced thing of beauty, with his lazy ripples of guitar givenjust the right touch of digital processing. The other song is"Dolphins," a track by 1960s folk singer Fred Neil (though TimBuckley's haunting rendition is probably the most notable), whichCooper gives a soulful rendition against a backdrop of abstractelectronic noise and sparse, minimal guitar. At times during thelengthy experimental interludes, especially during the "Virtual Surfer"section, the dense noisy textures, animal sounds and psychedelicelectronics sound remarkably similar to Black Dice's recent Creature Comforts.
The album is incredibly rich and evocative, and as a live performance,it's utterly flawless. Cooper takes live guitar processing and samplingas his raw material, using it to build something complex andsubstantive, full of ideas and surprises, not just abandoning ithalf-formed. Everyone who thought Fennesz' last record was the best of2004 would do well to listen to Mike Cooper's Reluctant Swimmer/Virtual Surfer,to hear similar musical strategies brought to their full potential by aveteran musician in his artistic prime. As usual, the only way to get acopy of this limited CD-R is to send the artist cash inside a birthdaycard to Hipshot headquarters in Rome. Frankly, I find it incrediblethat one of the many trendy experimental record labels in Europe hasn'tsnatched up Cooper's last few albums for a wider release.
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Phiiliip
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Now comes the follow-up, complete with an arsenalof guest appearances from The Soft Pink Truth, The Streets, Avenue D,Excepter and Khan. While Phiiliip seems to be attempting to move awayfrom the schizoid bedroom pop thing and a little more into music thatcould be deemed danceable (maybe), Divided By Lightning isunmistakably still the work of that cute but untalented aesthete Ifirst laid eyes on four years ago. More stunningly annoying beatprogramming covered up by layers of digital sediment and bafflinglyoverworked vocal mutations. More lyrics about sex, drugs, exclusive loftparties, nouns, zombies, drugs, clothes, drugs, celebrities, self-pityand drugs. Hell, I'd be the last person to criticize an artist becauseof his obsession with drugs or drug music, but Phiiliip's drugobsession seems particularly lazy. He explicitly references Ketamineand Adderall in the liner notes, both of which I am familiar with frompersonal abuse, and I'm not at all surprised that Phiiliip is tooderanged to be able to tell good from bad.
The best moments on thealbum come from the collaborations, with the clean-edged throbbingsassiness of "4 the 2nd (Soft Pink Truth Remix)" and "Off the Leash(Khan Remix)" coming the closest to Phiiliip's experimental artfagdance music aspirations. Other tracks attempt to piggyback the NYCnoise movement, most notably "Blue Moon (Excepter Remix)," whichsubjects the Henry Mancini classic to the Black Dice treatment. Just toenforce the painful eclecticism of the album, Phiiliip ends with asustained power electronics attack ("Fuck Music") and a low-fi versionof the Boyz II Men ballad "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday."It's all so incredibly fucking weird that I really wish I couldrecommend it, but I can't.
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