Mike Cooper: Life and Death in Paradise + Milan Live Acoustic 2018

It’s a pleasure today to announce another (double!) reissue project with one of our musical heroes, the legendary singer, guitarist, songwriter, electronic composer, improviser, visual and video artist, intrepid world traveler, and aloha shirt aficionado Mike Cooper.

Cooper wrote Life and Death in Paradise, his final songwriter record, a suite of gloaming glam-rock anthems performed with a spiritual jazz trio, while living on the Costa Tropical of Granada, Spain, an era when he was considering retiring from music altogether. A chance encounter and a last-ditch record deal convinced him to make one last album, which he recorded in 1974 at Pathway Studios in London, with “The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World,” featuring the inventive South African jazz rhythm section of Louis Moholo and Harry Miller with UK saxophonist Mike Osborne.

This first-ever reissue includes a bonus CD of Milan Live Acoustic 2018, a previously unreleased solo set that represents Cooper’s return, after forty-four years pursuing free improvisation and electronics, to a new, deconstructed approach to singing, steel guitar, and songcraft.

Ahead of their July 14 release, pre-order the LP+CD or 2xCD set and stream “O.M.M. Coda” (the initials stand for Osborne, Maholo, and Miller) from Life and Death in Paradise and “Peach Trees” from Milan Live Acoustic 2018 below (free downloads of both are included with all PoB webstore and Bandcamp pre-orders).

Pre-Order the LP+CD or 2xCD

$11.00 – $27.00

FORMAT

Pre-Order/Pre-Save/Preview Life and Death in Paradise digital/streaming album and all combined physical formats

Pre-Save/Preview “Milan Live Acoustic” digital/streaming album only

Stream “O.M.M. Coda” and “Peach Trees (live)”

Beautiful, f*cked-up mid-70s rock that’s really not like anything else. A mélange of mersh/avant/blues/folk/rock/jazz sh*teroo, Life and Death in Paradise is a most splendid anomaly with hints of everyone from Gram Parsons to Michael Hurley to the Welfare State … Allow it into your head, and it will blossom like the strange mushroom it is.” – Byron Coley

The first-ever reissue of Life and Death in Paradise, Mike Cooper’s final songwriter record, and the first release of Milan Live Acoustic 2018
Deluxe LP+CD edition features 140g black virgin vinyl; matte jacket with spot gloss details; and a six-panel foldout insert with additional artwork and an essay by the artist about both records
Deluxe 2xCD edition features a matte gatefold jacket with spot gloss details, and an eight-panel version of the same insert
RIYL: Derek Bailey, David Bowie, Tim Buckley, Sandy Bull, John Cale, Michael Chapman, Lol Coxhill, Johnny Dyani, Davey Graham, Steve Gunn, Van Morrison, Louis Moholo, Mike Osborne, Lou Reed, Sonny Sharrock, Television, Welfare State

Acknowledgments for Mike Cooper and Our Previous Reissues

8.6: Best New Reissue.Trout Steel has the gracefully exhaled quality of a master statement. The album mostly moves in long, heaving sighs—long, free-flowing sections where Cooper plays in open tunings and clusters of instruments take their turns speaking to each other around him… Sung verse[s] alternate with extended jamming like honey running from a spoon. In a way, he’s like Van Dyke Parks; equally in love with traditions and in thrall to eccentricity, someone whose solo records build an alternate set of rules that their maker has no intention of spelling out for you. – Pitchfork

Best reissues of 2014. The sound of a folk-rooted prodigy navigating the rapids of psychedelia. What puts his music in a league of its own is his taste for free-jazz-style instrumental play, with his own slithery slide guitar darting through abstract arrays of horns, strings, piano and percussion. Here, his singer-songwriter and experimental sides form a gnarly yin-yang marriage. – Rolling Stone

One of the pre-eminent players on the Brit folk and blues scenes. Given his organic approach to composing; his truly dazzling abilities with acoustic and slide guitars; and his predilection for just the right sidemen and arrangements, Cooper was among the most poised musicians of his generation, and Trout Steel proves the point time and again over its 11 tracks. What a ride Trout Steel is: exhilarating and adventurous each time it is played. – AllMusic

8/10. For those of us interested in how roots music can intersect with the avant-garde, the rediscovery of guitarist Mike Cooper is a fortuitous one. These exceptional LPs reflect the freedoms and open-minded spirit of the times. – Uncut

4 stars. Charts Cooper’s “voyage out” with his warm folk songs venturing into Pharaoh Sanders-inspired skronk … with a grasp of the infinite worthy of the Incredible String Band. – MOJO

4 stars. A deconstruction of folk music that simultaneously bypasses the mainstream rock of the day, sustained on a knife-edge by Cooper’s underlying guitar… It’s completely unconventional, immediately setting Cooper apart from anybody else in the early 70s folk circle. A rewarding, intriguing body of work. – Record Collector

Cooper was forging connections between folk and experimental musics long before America got New or Weird … – Keith Moliné of Pere Ubu, for The Wire