Friday 27 September 2019, 7.30pm
Mike Cooper / guitar / electronics / voice / video
David Toop - lap steel guitar / flutes / electronics
Steve Beresford - keyboards / electronics
Pat Thomas - keyboards / electronics
Live improvisation, songs, field recordings, real time sampling, digital treatments and loops.
“Reluctant Swimmer/Virtual Surfer is one of my favourite live recordings initially issued on my Hipshot cdr series in 2003 and re-issued on vinyl by Discrepant and was a landmark concert for me – opening up free improvising, real time sampling, looping and electronics to songs. A direction I have since pursued with enthusiasm. – Mike Cooper
http://www.cooparia.com/discography/reluctant-swimmer/
https://discrepant.bandcamp.com/album/reluctant-swimmer-virtual-surfer
"The four parts of Reluctant Swimmer were originally recorded as a seamless performance and are broken in two here, segueing from a swirl of what sounds like prepared guitar rattle pinged thru an FX pedal, to coalesce at a cosmic country cover of Van Dyke Parks’ Movies Is Magic as you’ve never heard it before, then melting out into Virtual Surfer’s humid canopy of location recordings and radiophonic chaos, and fading back into view with a take on Fred Neil’s folk rock classic The Dolphins swaddled in discordant electronic feedback.
Really can’t think of many other 75 year old guitarists whose music still feels somehow relevant thru it’s sheer, expressive abstraction nowadays. And this recording proves; Mike Cooper is pretty special.” – Boomkat
“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.
David Toop has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970. This encompasses improvised music performance, writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera. It includes eight acclaimed books, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Sinister Resonance (2010), Into the Maelstrom (2016), Flutter Echo (2019) and Inflamed Invisible: Writing On Art and Sound 1976-2018 (2019). Briefly a member of David Cunningham’s pop project The Flying Lizards in 1979, he has released fourteen solo albums, from New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno’s Obscure label (1975) and Sound Body on David Sylvian’s Samadhisound label (2006) to Entities Inertias Faint Beings (2016) and Apparition Paintings (2021). His 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual were released on Sub Rosa as Lost Shadows (2016). In recent years his collaborations include Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, Tania Caroline Chen, John Butcher, Ken Ikeda, Elaine Mitchener, Henry Grimes, Sharon Gal, Camille Norment, Sidsel Endresen, Alasdair Roberts, Lucie Stepankova, Fred Frith, Thurston Moore, Ryuichi Sakamoto. Curator of sound art exhibitions including Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery (2000), his opera – Star-shaped Biscuit – was performed in 2012.
Steve Beresford has been a central figure in the British and international spontaneous music scenes for over fifty years, freely improvising on piano, objects, electronics and other things with people like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink and John Zorn. Long-standing groups have included Alterations (with David Toop, Terry Day and Peter Cusack), The Melody Four (with Lol Coxhill and Tony Coe, both RIP) and London Improvisers Orchestra.
He has written songs, composed for large and small ensembles, and scored short films, feature films, TV shows and commercials. He was part of the editorial teams of ‘Musics’ and ‘Collusion’ magazines, writes about music in various contexts, and was a senior lecturer in music at the University of Westminster.
Steve has worked with Christian Marclay on various Marclay mixed media pieces. He has also worked with The Slits, Najma Akhtar, Stewart Lee, Ivor Cutler, Prince Far-I, Alan Hacker, Tania Chen, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Faradena Afifi, Blanca Regina, Ray Davies, Mandhira De Saram, The Flying Lizards, Zeena Parkins, The Portsmouth Sinfonia, Ilan Volkov, Rachel Musson, Vic Reeves, Lore Lixenberg, Valentina Magaletti and many others.
Beresford has an extensive discography - around 500 releases - as performer, arranger, free-improviser, composer, conductor and producer. He was awarded a Paul Hamlyn award for composers in 2012.
In 2021, Bloomsbury published a book by Andy Hamilton: ‘Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise: Conversations with Steve Beresford’.
In 2022, Siglio published the book ‘Call and Response’, which partnered photographs by Christian Marclay with notated improvisations by Beresford.
Pat Thomas studied classical piano from aged 8 and started playing Jazz from the age of 16. He has since gone on to develop an utterly unique style - embracing improvisation, jazz and new music. He has played with Derek Bailey in Company Week (1990/91) and in the trio AND (with Noble) – with Tony Oxley’s Quartet and Celebration Orchestra and in Duo with Lol Coxhill.
"Sartorially shabby as Thomas may be, and on first impression even rather stolid, he has a somewhat imperious charisma that’s immediately amplified when he starts to play. Unlike other pianists whose virtuosity seems to be racing ahead of their thought processes Thomas always seems supremely in command of his gift, and his playing, no matter how free and ready to tangle with abstraction, always carries a charge of authoritative exactitude." - The Jazzmann
