Blue Guitar -- Mike Cooper --This collection first appeared on my Hipshot c.d.r. label in 2010 in a limited edition and was released on vinyl on Idea Records.

At the time I 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 is found lurking within the words, lines, and verse.
In 2010 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) had 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 over 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.
Now in 2020, ten years since this original set, there have been many live versions of these pieces. The original idea was that I could sing them over any improvised backing as there is no fixed chord or harmonic sequence and the melody could be improvised as well. There are solo versions and versions with several other musicians but this original solo acoustic version remains one of my personal favourites.

“ Things as they are / are changed upon the blue guitar ”- ( Wallace Stevens – Man With The Blue Guitar )

" Sometimes when you cut into the present the future leaks out." ( William Burroughs )

Review - Lopsider Mike Cooper makes some of the most infuriating virtuoso acoustic guitar music we’ve ever heard, which means it’s all things good..(over) the fragments, shimmers, whines and wheezes of his unclassifiable guitar playing, he skews a little high-concept, cutting up the texts of post-moderniest Thomas Pynchon and collaging them into noisy singsong.

In all honesty, it’s some of my favourite Cooper: expressive in the string-bends and haughty transitions, his guitar does all manner of things, often letting out guttural wines but sometimes achieving voice-like coos. His voice, as always, is a sage, omnipresent force, residing over the record with the same conviction and measure as a Bill Callahan. His flicks of guitar rarely cohere with his Pynchon collages, but they always sound-off one another, the super-fast inflections of his strums and picks making many of his musings feel both absurd and poignant: he says things like “there’s a trick I’m trying to do with a knife” as his guitar bellows below.

It’s much in the line of Eric Chenaux’s abstract delivery, in that it sounds like his song is being held on an elastic band that could snap at any time. His vocal moves in one direction against the complexities and anachronisms of his guitar. (Norman's Records Review by Robin)