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Trout Steel

by mike cooper

  • LP-PoB-013 Limited-edition
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

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

    Includes unlimited streaming of Trout Steel via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

  • CD-PoB-013
    Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    + Includes 20 pp. chapbook with an exhaustive essay, lyrics, and never published color photos

    Includes unlimited streaming of Trout Steel via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

  • LP+CD-PoB-013 Limited-edition
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    + Purchase both physical formats for a discounted price.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Trout Steel via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

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That's How 04:21
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Goodtimes 03:29
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Trout Steel 02:24
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Hope You See 04:20
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Weeping Rose 03:22

about

THIS TITLE IS OUT OF PRINT.

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Album page: paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pob-013/
Artist page: paradiseofbachelors.com/mike-cooper/
Other options: smarturl.it/PoB13

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.

With the oddly evocative choice of his third solo album’s title, appropriated from Richard Brautigan’s 1967 surrealist-pastoral novel Trout Fishing in America, Mike Cooper might very well have been describing his own mercurial musical practice. “Trout Steel” suggests a reflective, highly mutable, quicksilver riverine element, an apt metaphor for the lap steel runs summoned from his trademark National resophonic guitars and his restless, constantly evolving development as a singer, composer, interpreter, and improviser. 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. Because of his staunch refusal to settle on any single sonic palette, his career has maintained a slippery, elusive, and multihued character—troutlike, eddying—full of permutations, sudden departures and transformations, and unexpected articulations and detours.

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 molting began in 1970 with Trout Steel, on which Cooper took a decisive step away from the folk and blues scenes in which he was well-known—he had toured with Michael Chapman and traveled in the same circles as Bert Jansch, Wizz Jones, and Davey Graham, among others—toward the New Thing jazz of Pharaoh Sanders, Sonny Sharrock, and Derek Bailey, without sacrificing any of his lyrical songwriting or forsaking his established roots in the soil of the American Southern vernacular. Producer Peter Eden (Donovan, Bill Fay, Clive Palmer) assembled a crack team of English and South African jazz and folk musicians (including Mike Osborne, Harry Miller, Geoff Hawkins, Stefan Grossman, and Heron) to record these remarkable sessions, and the results are absolutely sui generis, a compelling mix of tradition, group improvisations, and unfettered studio explorations that presaged Cooper’s adventurous work for decades to come.

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

credits

released June 17, 2014

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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

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