This month at ResidenceSEA we host the British musician and composer Mike Cooper. He will be working  for four weeks at the residenceSEA , continuing his research called Island Gardens  to create music for imaginary, hyperreal beach scenes. He will also make a new audio piece for release on Room40 records later this year titled ‘Raft’, which will be dedicated to William Willis and Vital Alsar who both sailed balsa wood rafts across the Pacific Ocean from South America to Australia.

Mike Cooper plays lap steel guitar and sings, he is an improviser and composer, he works with video/sound installations and he is a radio arts producer. He his  open to meet remarkable people for collaborations. He will be walking, listening and recording for a month in Crete, searching for a model to create an experience of imaginary landscape of sound and story telling by discovering the Genius Loci: the ‘spirit of the place’ of Crete island.

‘Island Gardens’ is an on-going multi screen short video installation project connecting small island cultures around the world by exploring their sound, story, myth, magical thinking and visual beauty. Island Gardens project was filmed in Bali, East Timor, Guadaloupe, Singapore, Hong Kong, Greece, and other exotic locations. The work Island Gardens was premiered at GRIM Marseille in 2014 with 17 of the videos projected on five separate flat screens with headphones.

About the artist

Mike Cooper is a colourful, iconoclastic performer and composer whose career began in the late 1960s. For the past 50 years he has been an international artistic explorer constantly pushing the boundaries. After establishing a profile as a folk/blues/jazz musician and, later, exploring the Hawaiian-styled guitarist, he have also collaborate with the avant-garde contexts of the London Musicians Collective. He has performed with other notable experimentalists such as Mike Gibbs, David Toop, Lol Coxhill and Mike Abrahams, and released a series of recordings on independent labels and self-released CDs. He has developed a repertoire of music for several silent films re-contextualising the traditional music and image. He  traveled around the Pacific and collaborate with musicians, filmmakers and visual artists around the world.  He is now based in Rome, and work with  sound-fields recordings, performances, tours and writing music about the sound and culture of islands.

Visit his website at www.cooparia.com