Thursday 5 October 2023, 7.30pm
Please note that Geoff Hawkins and Aaron Hawkins are unable to make the show due to unforeseen circumstances but Mike Cooper's Black Flamingoes will be going ahead as a trio.
"Mike Cooper marks over 50 years of deadly cool and restless experimentation with a masterful melange of free jazz, Oceanic, and Hawaiian inspirations in his umpteenth hallucinatory collage. More than half a century since his 1969 debut, Mike Cooper’s music remains strikingly fresh and in a timeline of its own on ‘Black Flamingo’. The album’s vitality is largely due to Cooper’s role as a consummate collaborator, as he weaves in a panoply of UK peers and remote jams that harmonise with, as well as disrupt, his eternally imaginative and innovative style.
Seriously tell us who else is making this sort of rudely disciplined racket at 80 years old?! The definition of a living legend.” – Norman Records.
“Cooper is the troubadour of our time” - Peter Margasak - The Wire
“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.
CHRIS RAINIER is a South-African born performer, improviser and composer from Melbourne, now based in London. Alongside Dutch ensemble Scordatura – led by violist Elisabeth Smalt – he has performed the music of various composers whose practices explore tuning systems outside of Equal Temperament. He has also collaborated with various craftspeople in the UK, Europe and Australia to create replicas of some of Harry Partch’s unique musical instruments, with a particular focus on the composer’s various microtonally adapted guitars. He has performed solo and in collaboration with other performers in a diverse range of concert venues, including the Slade School of Fine Art, the Orpheus Institute [Ghent], the Kunitachi College Of Music [Tokyo], the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Harry Partch Archives [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign].
Rainier's most recent release is “Sorrowful Songs of the Silverswords [2023], a collection of pieces that forge intersections between compositional frameworks and improvisation on his replica of Partch's first Adapted Guitar 1. This year will also see the vinyl release of his interpretations of some of Partch's earliest compositions for voice, Adapted Guitar 1 and Adapted Viola on the Belgian label bwaa.
