mike cooper: blue guitar

Mike Cooper's Blue Guitar is a collection that first appeared on Cooper's Hipshot CDr label in 2010 in a limited edition. It is presented here on Idea Records, for the first time on vinyl. Upon its initial release Cooper wrote: "For the past couple of years I have been collating a body of text culled (mostly) from Thomas Pynchon's novels Gravity's Rainbow and V and making cut-up collage pieces in the spirit of William Burroughs, Kurt Schwitters, Tom Phillips and others. Those two particular novels interest me because they are set in the period that I was born, however no reference to that period is intended in my pieces. Hopefully a more contemporary comment was found lurking within the words, lines, pages and paragraphs. Recently my interest in playing the guitar in a more or less 'traditional' manner, but still incorporating various 'extended techniques' (as opposed to using it purely as a sound source) has been re-kindled along with a renewed interest in blues, Greek rembetika, flamenco, Portuguese fado and other traditional and improvised music around the Mediterranean which in turn brought out the singer in me again... I have lived in the Mediterranean region for 30 years and listened to its music and I wanted to make something that would hopefully have some of its spirit without making reference to any of it musically." "Things as they are / are changed upon the blue guitar" --Wallace Stevens, Man With The Blue Guitar (1937) "Sometimes when you cut into the present the future leaks out." --William Burroughs. Mastered by Rashad Becker. Cover design by Tom Recchion. Comes on 180 gram vinyl; Includes a lyrics insert; Includes a postcard insert; Linen Wrapped/Foil Stamped; Comes in an Old Style Tip-On jacket.