Mike Cooper - Rayon Hula (15th Anniversary Edition) '2019

Tracks list

Ambient/Electronic/Exotica. 
After several trips, beginning in 1994, to the Pacific and its Island Nations,
Australia and subsequently to South East Asia, I conceived the idea of making an
updated more ‘now’ version of some of the Exotica music that
originated in 1950’s America. Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny were the two
I mostly had in mind at the time, but I didnt want it to sound like them and the
two words ‘Ambient’ and ‘Electronic’ had to figure
large. I was deeply influenced by the ambience of the places I was visiting
(Australian birds are scarily creative) and lo-fi electronics were something I
had been working with in my free improvisation gigs since the 80’s. I
wasn’t playing live very much in Europe, but in Australia and New Zealand
regularly and I was living parallel musical lives, playing folk festivals as
well as free improv and experimental music gigs. No-one was issuing recorded
work by me, so I started my own DIY cd.r. label, Hipshot, and sold them via the
internet. I was free to record whatever I wanted and I did, starting in 1999
with Kiribati. 

Kiribati is a Pacific Island Nation and was one of the last places to be settled
by humans and will be one of the first to disappear as the waters rise due to
Global Warming. Is music political that has no lyrics? I would like to think so.
A second edition, Globe Notes, appeared in 2001. The music was heavily
influenced by reading James Hamilton Patterson’s books Seven Tenths and
Playing With Water. The planet is seven tenths water. 

The summer of 2004 house sitting in Palombara, 40 minutes outside of Rome, at
our friend Jo Campbell’s house, in the company of several dogs and
numerous cats, I set to work outside in the shed with a Zoom Sampletrack ST-224,
two mini disc recorders and a Tascam four track cassette machine; a pile of
Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny cds and my lap steel. My intention was to create a
kind of music that I had hoped to hear when we visited Hawaii in the early
90’s (some kind of Hawaiian Futurism maybe?) which we never did. Rayon
Hula appeared from the shed and was initially released as Hipshot c.d.r.
HIP-007. I submitted it to the Ars Electronica awards in Austria and was very
surprised when it received some kind of a prize. I think that David Toop had
something to do with that, as he was on the jury (thanks David). It was picked
up by Cabin Records, a new label initiated by Pete Fowler and Graham Erickson
and released as a double 10inch vinyl set. Pete Fowler is an artist/designer and
inventor of Monsterism toys as well as illustrator for Super Furry Animals
recorded works. He and Graham designed and hand silk screened the covers for
this limited edition. 

Although the idea was an homage to Arthur Lyman, it was also an homage to Steve
Feld who introduced me to the concept of ‘lift up over sounding’ in
his book Sound and Sentiment, a study of the Kaluli people of Papua and their
relationship with their aural environment. From it I gleaned, among other
things, the idea of looped sounds played simultaneously but out of sync. An idea
which had in fact guided me from the beginning of the series. The Zoom
Sampletrack allowed me to make loops that didnt automatically quantise when
played simultaneously, plus it had the capability of pitch shift, reverse and a
number of other effects built in. Some of the pieces, once the samples were
loaded, were recorded directly from the unit in one take.

Lawrence English at Room40 encouraged me to continue the series and combining
another of my artistic roads, live soundtracks for silent films, we released
White Shadows In The South Seas in 2013 followed by Fratello Mare in 2015 and
Raft in 2017. 

15 years have passed and the tide has risen and retracted in the islands,
sometimes extremely violently in places, but we offer a re-mastered, re-edited
2019 version of Rayon Hula. 

Tracklist:
01. Mike Cooper - Mele Manu & Hookani Pila (7:59)
02. Mike Cooper - Musa Shiya (2:54)
03. Mike Cooper - Kokoke Nalu (3:38)
04. Mike Cooper - Paumalu (6:22)
05. Mike Cooper - Rayon Hula (2:12)
06. Mike Cooper - Hoomanau Nui (1:57)
07. Mike Cooper - Alohabama (2:57)
08. Mike Cooper - Caught Inside (For Daniel Duane) (2:19)
09. Mike Cooper - Typhoon Lagoon (3:01)
10. Mike Cooper - Mika Ohe (2:43)
11. Mike Cooper - The New Urban Slide / The Tiki Bar Is Closed (6:18)

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