Slow Motion Lightning
From Mike Cooper
I made the first set of pieces for this collection during the intense heat of the 2023 Spanish summer; 32 degrees inside the house at night
sometimes. I had just finished reading one of the most extraordinary
volumes of fiction ( something I rarely read ) titled The Guyana Quartet by the Caribbean writer Wilson Harris. I came to this book via the works of Nathaniel Mackay, who recommended Wilson Harris as an important
influence on his own creative writing.
While researching further for myTropical Gothic project i came across another writer from Guyana, Edgar Mittelholzer, and his book My Bones And My Flute. The two books couldn’t be more different. Mittelholzer’s book is described as ‘a ghost story in the old fashioned manner’. While The Guyana Quartet is one of the strangest books I have ever read. A lot of the time I had no idea what was going on but its strangeness kept drawing me into it and onwards. It is extremely psychedelic and tropical gothic with an added healthy dose of quantum time. Sometimes the characters are both alive and dead at the same time.
The stories all takes place either in the Amazon basin rainforests of
Guyana or the Rupununi Savannah, home to a vast array of exotic wildlife which includes jaguars, sloths, monkeys, giant otters, tapirs, emerald tree boa snakes and more. I wanted this musical edition to be an aural reflection of the landscapes conjured in my minds eye as I was reading.
Most of my samples and loops are created using a ukulele, my fingers, a metal hip-flask, (for rum), an empty St James Rum bottle, field recordings from Martinique, electric and acoustic lap steel guitar and a virtual pedal steel guitar. The flute player is unknown but maybe from Vietnam.
The titles of my pieces are mostly taken from the two books as well as
the title, Slow Motion Lightning, which resonated with me as a
description of our current situation with regards climate change, and
other man made disasters that have occurred since beginning the pieces.
Slow Motion Lightning; deadly and unpredictable never strikes
twice in the same place except when it does.
credits
released November 1, 2024
“The Carib flute was hollowed from the bones of the enemy in times of war. Flesh was plucked and consumed and in the process secrets were digested.Spectres arose from or reposed in the flute.” – Anthropologist Michael Swan.
“Eldorado, call it what you will is inside us” – Wilson Harris.