The Dream Island of Birds [LP]

Mike Cooper - The Dream Island of Birds [LP]

Mike Cooper returns to Discrepant with The Dream Island of Birds, a release that blurs the lines between memory, field recording, and reimagined sound. In the early 1990s, Cooper met illustrator and writer Charles van Sandwyk while walking on a small island in Fiji. Van Sandwyk was living there quietly, working from a modest bamboo house near the beach. Years later, Cooper learned that following a serious car accident, van Sandwyk experienced vivid dreams during his recovery -- one of which became a small illustrated book titled The Dream Island of Birds. A signed postcard from that book still hangs in Cooper's studio. In 2012, Cooper spent a month as artist-in-residence on Pulau Ubin, a small island between Singapore and Malaysia, recording birds and insects across the island. Home to more than 300 resident and migratory bird species, Pulau Ubin provided the source material for this album, later combined with electronics and digital processing. The track titles reference some of the island's more evocatively named birds, though the sounds themselves are not literal representations. One piece is not derived from live birds at all, but imagined entirely through electronic means. Neither documentary nor abstraction, The Dream Island of Birds sits between field recording, memory, an(more...)

A1. Oriental Pied Hornbill
A2. Ruby Cheeked Sunbird
A3. Red Jungle Fowl
A4. White Throated Laughing Thrush
B1. Greater Racket-Tailed Drone
B2. Scarlet Backed Flowerpecker
B3. Avianics