Mike Cooper preorders are on their way to you now. Check out a preview of the packaging, as well as the forthcoming collaborative RVNG INTL record by Cooper and our main man Steve Gunn, from whom you shall be hearing more very, very soon.
Friends, the good people at Pitchfork are streaming the entirety of Mike Cooper’s Trout Steel (PoB-13) and Places I Know/The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper (PoB-14) through June 16, a day before the June 17 release day. Dig in.
Courtesy of Dangerous Minds, we’ve got another Mike Cooper stunner for you. “Country Water,” the opening track on the Places I Know/The Machine Gun Co. 1971-72 double album, is, true to its name, a riverine country rocker complete with sawing fiddle solos and some heavy-duty piano banging.
Listen to the long-form centerpiece track off of our reissue of Cooper’s classic 1970 album Trout Steel and read a dispatch from the man himself from Spain, concerning the poems of Rumi and the studio techniques of dub music.
After two years of work to liberate these long out-of-print masterpieces from the vaults, we are thrilled to announce pre-orders for 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 1971 and 1972 masterpieces, which span his song-based and improvisation-based styles of the early 1970s, are presented for the very first time as the definitive double album, as Cooper originally intended them to be released. These historic sessions veer from the impeccable conceptual folk-rock artistry of Places I Know to the utterly singular, long-form “songmaking” deconstructions of the more radical The Machine Gun Co.
The first artist-sanctioned reissue—and first-ever vinyl reissue—of iconoclastic English-born, Rome-based folk and experimental music legend Mike Cooper’s classic 1970 album, Trout Steel presents a heady homebrew of lap steel blues traditions, avant-jazz group improvisations, and studio explorations that presaged Cooper’s adventurous work for decades to come.
