more from
Paradise of Bachelors
We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Places I Know​/​The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper

by mike cooper

  • LP-PoB-014 Limited-edition
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    + First-ever artist-sanctioned and vinyl reissue
    + 150g virgin vinyl as a deluxe gatefold 2xLP
    + Includes 16 pp. chapbook with an essay by Mike Cooper, lyrics, and never published color photos
    + Includes digital download coupon

    Includes unlimited streaming of Places I Know/The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

  • CD-PoB-014
    Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    + First-ever artist-sanctioned reissue, two years in the making
    + Includes 20 pp. chapbook with an essay by Mike Cooper, lyrics, and never published color photos

    Includes unlimited streaming of Places I Know/The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

  • LP+CD-PoB-014 Limited-edition
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    + Purchase both physical formats for a discounted price.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Places I Know/The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

1.
2.
3.
4.
Time to Time 08:27
5.
6.
7.
Now I Know 04:57
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Lady Anne 05:15

about

THIS TITLE IS OUT OF PRINT.

*

Album page: paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pob-014/
Artist page: paradiseofbachelors.com/mike-cooper/
Other options: smarturl.it/PoB14

ALBUM NARRATIVE


Paradise of Bachelors is proud to present the first artist-sanctioned reissues—and first-ever vinyl reissues—of iconoclastic English-born, Rome-based folk and experimental music legend Mike Cooper’s classic trio of early 1970s avant-folk/rock records: Trout Steel (1970), Places I Know (1971), and The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper (1972). The latter two titles are presented for the very first time as the definitive double album, as Cooper originally intended them to be released.

Listening to Cooper’s recordings retrospectively in sequence reveals a rangy narrative of perennial reinvention from document to document through a playful approach to the deconstruction of “folk” musics and all that gross genre signifier implies and denies. By the time the Rolling Stones invited him to join the band in the early ’60s, and he politely declined (true story; Brian Jones took the gig), he had already progressed far beyond the circumscribed bounds of their early, hip-histrionic Albionic blues. By the time he was rumored to have retired from music in the mid ’70s, disappearing from his home in Southern England into Southern Spain to become a fisherman (an amusing fiction; he suffers from seasickness), he had already moved beyond his heady homebrew of progressive, free jazz-framed songcraft into increasingly less conventionally structured frontiers of open improvisation and later, electronic composition.

The Machine Gun Co. band (named for the 1968 Peter Brötzmann album) coalesced around Cooper’s desire to continue the improvisatory path forged on Trout Steel in a more sustainable manner, with a steady core group of likeminded musicians able to buttress its daring, long-form improvisatory vaults with a bedrock foundation. Peter Eden (Donovan, Bill Fay, Clive Palmer) produced the historic sessions, which veered from the impeccable conceptual folk-rock artistry of Places I Know (as Cooper explains, “the secret of the title of this record is that it was meant as a kind of covers record, or an homage to some musicians and songwriters that I liked at the time, the ‘places’ in the title—I was interested in seeing if I could emulate some other people without actually sounding like them”) to the utterly singular “songmaking” deconstructions of the more radical The Machine Gun Co., wherein the band erects lapidary arrangements reminiscent of Tim Buckley, only to dismantle them into virtuosic passages of Beefheartian free-jazz scree and skronk. According to Cooper:

What was initially planned was a double album, with one record played by the Machine Gun Co. and the other with arrangements by Mike Gibbs and his orchestra. Those two records were conceived as a double album aimed at covering the wide range of music I was interested in and gently leading the listener from the more accessible Places I Know, with its Mike Gibbs arrangements, into the more (for the times) extreme areas of The Machine Gun Co. That never happened, and they were released as two separate records a year apart.

Places I Know/The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper is Paradise of Bachelors’ attempt, two years in the making, to correct this historical oversight and offer this masterpiece as it was designed to be experienced, as an extraordinarily ambitious document spanning Cooper’s song-based and improvisation-based styles of the early 1970s.

+ First-ever artist-sanctioned and vinyl reissue
+ Includes 16 pp. chapbook with an essay by Mike Cooper, lyrics, and never published color photos
+ Available on 150g virgin vinyl as a gatefold 2xLP, in a deluxe limited edition, as well as on gatefold CD and digital formats
+ Vinyl edition includes digital download coupon

www.paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-14

credits

released June 17, 2014

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

mike cooper Roma, Italy

Mike Cooper has traced a path completely his own for the past 60 years as an international musical explorer, lap steel guitarist, singer, improviser and composer, performing and recording, solo and in a number of inspired groupings and a variety of genres. stretching the possibilities of the guitar with an eclectic mix of the many styles he has practiced over the years. ... more

contact / help

Contact mike cooper

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like mike cooper, you may also like: