Mike Cooper liberates minds at The Ivy House
Monday, October 10, 2016
The Goose Is Out carry a strong rep for folk promotions in south London, pinning down a confederation of conducive tradition-leaning locales, such as tonight's hotspot: The Ivy House in Nunhead.
This community-owned pale-ale palace is a vision in gold lamé and wood-panelling, a fitting habitué for greying ponytail disarmament. And so it is tonight, as Hawaiian-shirt hunter and post-everything emissary Mike Cooper turns a schoolboy's swimming trip into a haunting pilgrimage inside Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Like a card-trick occultist Cooper is quick to disarm the audience, with veritable bouts of Van Dyke Parks verse and exquisite slide-guitar sleight-of-hand, before waggling a viola bow above his head like a horsewhip or shamanic wand. Custom lies confounded in a whirr of heavy metal hula-loops and beguiling croon. The storyteller's spell of the arch troubadour is quarantined – distorted and pulled for abstract emotional heft in variegated cut-ups of random Pynchon pages, as radio static curdles the air with afterlife transmissions. Is it the ghost of William Burroughs trying to break through at the point where old-time hooey hits the Naked Lunch nexus, linguistics reclaimed through a nod to Ornette's multi-phonic phrasings?
It's a marvel and a horror show, a place where grime-tapes grizzle out Mississippi ooze and ex-social workers try to negotiate two-for-one deals with B-movie cyborgs erecting deckchairs on a desolate beach. This is Cooper's improvisatory circus. All played out beneath the sign of a goose's severed foot.
– Spencer Grady