Friday 2 September 2022, 8pm
Delighted to host a very special show for the one and only Mike Cooper celebrating 80 times around the sun.
“The icon of post-everything music” – Lawrence English (::Room40::)
For the past 50 years he has been an international artistic explorer constantly pushing the boundaries.
Mike Cooper’s output of the past half century has been described as ‘post-everything’. It’s a fitting phrase really when you consider he has been at the beating heart of so many critical musical moments. From the development of the blues touring circuit in the UK, through the growth of the folk scene and into the explosion of free improvisation that came to define a generation of UK musicians. Amidst it all, working at stitching these disparate forms into some kind of deterritorialised zone, was Mike Cooper. - Lawrence English Room 40 Records.
“Cooper, 75 this year, is making the most adventurous music of his life… incredibly rich and evocative, and as a live performance, it’s utterly flawless. Cooper takes live guitar processing and sampling as his raw material, using it to build something complex and substantive, full of ideas and surprises, not just abandoning it half-formed.” – (Jonathan Dean – Brainwashed)
He plays lap steel guitar and sings, he is an improviser and composer, song-maker, a visual and installation artist; film and video maker and radio arts producer.
Finlay Clark is an artist based in London. 2023 will see Clark continue to work with Still House Plants as well as play violin for Kahil El’Zabar and begin a new composition. Clark has previously collaborated with Ailie Ormston, Vera Karlsson, Dorit Chrysler, Ligeti Quartet and Phaedra Ensemble, as well as taken piano lessons with David Cherry and performed violin with Neneh Cherry and Exotic Sin.
