Fratello Mare, which takes its title from Folco Quilici's classic 1975 film, continues UK-born, Italy-based musician Mike Cooper's ode to the Pacific, its people, and the traditions that have flowed from that part of the world into seemingly endless iterations within contemporary culture. Recorded across 2014, the tropical opus dovetails neatly with Cooper's other Room40 editions, White Shadows in the South Seas (RM 454CD, 2013) and the post-everything classic Rayon Hula (2004). It expands his combination of highly personal lap steel playing with exotic music and percussion alongside field recordings made on islands across Southeast Asia and the Caribbean while on residencies and other travels. At the record's heart is a yearning for these distant islands that dot the vast oceans. A love letter of sorts, a poetic and dreamlike wandering, that sonically traverses the ever-changing edge of land and sea and Cooper's musical imagination. Some lesser-known Mike Cooper facts: a young Mike Cooper can be spotted playing a beatnik guitarist on an anti-nuclear march in THE 1963 beat cult film That Kind of Girl; his first band, The Blues Committee, played with and supported such blues legends as John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, and Jimmy Reed; Cooper was central in launching several of the first folk and blues venues outside London, especially in and around Reading; he was a regular on John Peel's program from 1969 through 1975, recording numerous sessions; he formed his free improvised music group The Recedents with Lol Coxhill and Roger Turner in 1982, threading directly into London's vibrant improvisation community; he moved to Italy in 1988 after a slew of musical projects during the '80s in the UK and EU; since 1994 he has spent increasing amounts of time touring and exploring Oceania and other regions; one outcome of his explorations is Beach Crossings - Pacific Footprints, a radiophone work commissioned by Italian and Australian radio that traces the history of European colonization in the Pacific from Tahiti up to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima; his recordings have been reissued numerous times by various labels across the globe, while original pressings can be found for obscene prices via various outlets; in 2015 Cooper celebrated 50 years as a professional musician -- his first recorded release, the Out of the Shades 7", was released in 1965.
