Keir Cooper + Eleanor Westbrook

Star Quality is a collaboration between singer Eleanor Westbrook and guitarist Keir Cooper, and the premise is of Eleanor sending Keir a number of vocal improvisations ranging from folky to operatic, which would then be digitally manipulated and have guitar atmospheres added. It is an intriguing proposition and one that veers over twelve diverse tracks from folk-inflected whimsy to stunning feats of acrobatic electrification. Star Quality starts out fairly simply with acoustic guitar and Eleanor’s pure clarity, but with the interjection of a found voice that joins her in an unusual duet. “Willow Tree : A Dialogue” is the only piece with words and the found voice causes an electric bluster in the guitar, a sense of darkness developing as the vocals turns frantic and faintly upsetting. It is a rollercoaster of variance that stays all the way through the album, with the vocal gymnastics seeming to push the guitar further, moments of dissonance at odds with the wordless ululations. At points these ululations are emotionally compelling and almost animalistic; a siren’s call luring the guitar from the narrowing path. The guitar has many different faces, pure tones and dirty scrapes rubbing shoulders while the digital manipulations of the voice mean that nothing can be assured. Scattered patterns disappear briefly into the abyss, but are pulled back by the skin of their teeth. A Native American war whoop changes the mood, causing the atmosphere to take a decidedly experimental detour. Duetting with herself, Eleanor reduces the guitars to pure texture, the body and the strings ripe for new manifestations. As the album progresses, so things seem to be more minutely dissected, but a classical guitar dash and a brief aria will appear as a palate cleanser before being subsumed and all bets are off as to where it might then lead. The diversity is extraordinary and the patterns that voice and guitar draw when left alone are delightful but never enough, becoming saturated with emotion and desire. There are some speedy post-rock structures later in the running and the rhythmic drive takes on another direction, with the digitally twisted voice often at odds. It is a wild ride that is often discomfiting because it just won’t stay still or crest a particular wave without being overwhelmed by the swell, both elements struggling, adrift far from home. The final track tries to put some of this in perspective as the only face-to-face recording on the album and it imbues a sense of normality, even if the voice at one point sounds like an old trimphone. It feels like an obvious conclusion to an adventure that pits voice and instrument into an energetic ballet, all movement and action seemingly spur of the moment decisions and quite breathtaking for it. – Mr Olivetti, FREQ https://freq.org.uk/reviews/keir-cooper-and-eleanor-westbrook-star-quality/

Keir Cooper and Eleanor Westbrook’s Star Quality is another Discus release and in a way presents us with music for which the precedents are unusually few. The billing of “speculations for guitar and voice” doesn’t really do much to lessen a feeling of elusiveness, which may or may not be down to the use of the digital audio workstation as a writing tool. The line between the spontaneous and the predetermined seems unusually blurred, and the music’s intriguing enough to transcend the snapshot impression offered by this brief and largely failed attempt at describing it; come, say, December of this year my view of it might well be radically transformed. – Nic Jones, JAZZ JOURNAL

One way to tell an avant-garde musical work from its title alone is when the title provides a quite precise statement relating to its compositional nature. And so it is that this collaborative set of songs by Keir Cooper and Eleanor Westbrook are structured around guitar and voice. ‘Willow Tree – A Dialogue’ takes the interesting form of – perhaps not surprisingly – a dialogue of sorts, in which Westbrook’s adopts two contrasting modes of delivery, with a spectacular operatic aria juxtaposed with a spoken-word interrogation as a counterpoint. The effect is closer to a simultaneous internal monologue running across the song itself rather than a dialogue in the conventional sense. Meanwhile, the delicately picked neoclassical guitar is subject to interruption by clunks and distortion and occasional whirs and bleeps and the operatic vocal strays off kilter and the dream which drifted in twists and flickers with darker shades: not pronounced enough to be truly nightmarish, but unsettling. The pair continue to explore the contrasts of melody and disharmony as Westbrook squeaks, squawks, trills, and purrs an infinite array of vocal gymnastics and Cooper’s guitar work, which chimes and treads delicately from folk to flamenco via classical streams, stamps on its own beauty with sudden and unexpected stops and stutters and forays into wrongness with stray notes and dissonance. ‘Superstar’ strays into the space which soundtracks a sense of derangement, the territory where things make no sense, and that place of incomprehension instils an unsettling confusion that borders on anxiety. ‘Modern Translation’ follows a similar trajectory: it’s a piece of magical neoclassical chamber music that’s twisted as if performed in an auditory hall of mirrors. Everything is wrong: something that should be soothing and beautiful is warped in a that it becomes unheimlich, eerie. It’s hard to locate a touchstone or reference point for this: perhaps there are elements of later Scott Walker present, blended with hints of The Ex with its more avant-jazz leanings. One can only muse as to how they came to create this work: despite its clear foundations in the realms of classical and opera, Star Quality ventures so far from this path that it often bears little resemblance to any given style. The pieces evidently do have quite detailed and complex structures, as there’s nothing haphazard or uncoordinated about the way the two play together, but it’s impossible to decipher them from an outside perspective. There’s a grand yet ethereal theatricality to ‘Bordering the Afterworld’, and ‘O’ soars and swoops and squeaks and whoops its way theatrically – and somewhat crazily – across some sprightly, if vaguely gothic-sounding guitar picking that suddenly, from nowhere, begins to buzz and thump. ‘The Time I Gave Up the Stage’ draws the curtain on an incredibly curious and as far off the wall as is imaginable. Star Quality clearly has theatrical inspirations and aspirations, but shows two artists who are more interested in exploring their outer limits than taking the limelight in a mainstream setting – and for that, I applaud them. – Christopher Nosnibor, AURAL AGGRAVATION  https://auralaggravation.com/2024/09/23/keir-cooper-eleanor-westbrook-star-quality-speculations-for-guitar-and-voice/

Star Quality: Speculations for Guitar and Voice brings together British soprano and experimental performance and sound artist Eleanor Westbrook (winner of the Elisabeth Schumann Lieder Duo prize and a trained clown) and electric guitarist-interdisciplinary artist Keir Cooper (who c-leads the jazz-rock big band Sweet Niche, that hosted Westbrook in its last album, and co-author of a punk prose revision of Shakespeare) who perform a set of ten songs that blur the distinction between jazz guitar, free improvisation, opera, contemporary music and sound art. This ambitious project initially debuted as a cinema film revisiting a 400-year-old tension as old as opera between the voice, words and music and searches for a shared power. Only the first song, «Willow Tree: A Dialogue», is based on an actual song, an English traditional song «Willow Tree». The other songs are based on dramatic and, imaginative, Dadaist, quite eccentric and mischievous vocal improvisations of Westbrook. Cooper laid down his guitar parts on these free-associative improvisations and subjected the vocals to extensive manipulations and digital editing, distancing the outcome from familiar works of singer-songwriters and guitarists. Cooper himself used these vocal improvisations as sonic labs that allowed him to experiment with the electric guitar as an orchestral instrument in an operatic setting and reassess it from possible angles. Cooper lists the guitar works of Elliot Sharp, Fred Frith, Annie Clark (St. Vincent), John Zorn and Derek Bailey as seminal influences as well as novelist Kathy Acker, visual artist Gerhard Richter and electro-acoustic composer Anna Meredith while Westbrook’s vocal art owes much to the work of Nina Hagen, Elaine Mitchener and Diamanda Galas. This duo employs the soprano voice with all the grandeur and drama and extends its vocal qualities to create surprising, captivating and highly resonant aesthetics. Cooper and Westbrook insist that all these digital, studio techniques and manipulations only solidify Star Quality’s eloquence, great wit and tangible warmth of fingers and flesh, vocal cords and blood, joy and sweat, that express so beautifully the human ingenuity and creativity. – Eyal Hareuveni, SALT PEANUTS https://salt-peanuts.eu/record/keir-cooper-eleanor-westbrook/

Alrighty, we’ve got ourselves a couple of Theatre People here, and if Keir Cooper + Eleanor Westbrook’s first collaborative album is not theatrical exactly, it locates a peculiar expressive niche with no other occupants I know of. Titled Star Quality – Speculations For Guitar And Voice (Discus), Cooper plays guitar on these ten pieces, which he says have been given substantial digital editing after the fact – sometimes this is obvious, often it still sounds like a flowing piece of improvisation. You might think of Keith Rowe when Cooper’s guitar sounds least like one, Marc Ribot or Richard Dawson during folkier or jazzier periods. This has been combined with the soprano vocal of Westbrook, whose operatic credentials are knowingly upturned by Cooper’s studio antics. It begins amiably enough, with a take on English folk song ‘The Willow Tree’, though we sense something’s afoot when Westbrook accompanies herself with a succession of blankly-recited non sequiturs. Thereafter, Westbrook’s vocal exhortations are wordless, still soprano in tone but reduced by Cooper to a patchwork of half-human, half-bird trilling and twittering. Meredith Monk and Maggie Nicols come to mind as antecedents of what’s going on here, although Star Quality’s vocals can’t be assessed independently of their production (or vice versa). – Noel Gardner,THE QUIETUS https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/new-weird-britain/new-weird-britain-review-october-2024-lolina-kitchen-cynics-imogen/

« Star quality – Speculations for guitar and voice » commence par leur réinterprétation d’un air du folklore anglais, façon polyphonie de la Renaissance qui se déglingue, pour ensuite glisser vers des performances vocales qui ne sont pas sans rappeler une Meredith Monk ou Diamanda Galas. Musique expérimentale qui nous captive et nous étonne et qui transcende les catégories : improvisations, jazz, musique expérimentale, airs d’opéra! – Guy Stuckens, RADIO AIR LIBRE

Für Star Quality – Speculations for Guitar and Voice (DISCUS 179) verantwortlich zeichnen KEIR COOPER + ELEANOR WESTBROOK. Sie als clown-y type theatre-making musician woman und versierte Sopranistin von German Liedern (Strauss, Schumann, Weil) & French Songs (Poulenc, Debussy), als Gianetta in Donizettis „The Elexir of Love“, als Monster in Libby Larsons „Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus“. Er mit dem Knowhow als Gi­tarrist von A Sweet Niche und als Remixer und extrovertierter Performer von „Don Quijo­te“. Wer Lieder erwartet, bekommt statt dessen, nach ‘Willow Tree: A Dialogue’ als dow­landeskem, aber angequetschtem und mit Computerstimme verstörtem Kunstlied, die Dekonstruktion von Kunstgesang, der Gitarre, der Sprache, der Liedform. Westbrook steuert in improvisierten Belcantofetzen Laute und Stimmungen bei, Cooper harft, klopft, tremoliert und jagt ihre Laute und seinen Saitenklang per Digital Audio Workstation mit Trillereffekten, Loops, Drones, Glitches, Staccato ins Hypermoderne. Vorbei am Pathos der Diva Plavalaguna in einerseits grüüüne Komik, die einen kapriziösen Duktus noch überspitzt, und andererseits kehrt er mit schwindsüchtigem Haspeln, kleinlautem Gicks und Gacks den larmoyanten Aspekt von einem Melodramma (giocoso) hervor. Nicht um­sonst steht Time, ever counting on / ever dying auf dem Cover. – Rigobert Dittmann, BAD ALCHEMY

Star Quality: Speculations for Guitar and Voice is a new release by genre-defying label Discus Music, featuring compositions by guitarist Keir Cooper and vocalist Eleanor Westbrook. The album’s title suggests a stripped-back, restrained approach to ensemble, but that is not what we get: bleeps and squawks and distorted wails punctuate an electronic mélange as hard to describe as I’m sure it was to compose. From the opening track, ‘Willow Tree – A Dialogue’, it is clear that we should leave our expectations at the door. A traditional English song is reimagined for two vocalists: one Westbrook herself, delivering a sometimes beautiful, sometimes mysterious, sometimes vulgar rendition of the melody; the other a computer-generated text-to-speech voice. This unusual duet is accompanied by erratically consonant electric guitars, and the result of all this is predictably disorienting and disembodied-nursery-rhyme-at-an-abandoned-playground-ish in its creep factor. After this opening gambit, Cooper and Westbrook leave words behind. Instead, Westbrook’s voice is the raw sonic material that Cooper cuts up and manipulates as he pleases. As the liner notes inform us, Star Quality sets out to be ‘sonically intriguing’, and on this front it is very successful. There is a Zappa-like striving for sonic weirdness which certainly will not be to everyone’s taste – but there are moments of ingenuity, like the frenetic speed-up that closes ‘Art Of Oblivion’.
Star Quality: Speculations for guitar and voice is as much about the process of its composition as it is about the finished product. There is a consistent improvisational quality, which undoubtedly stems from the fact that the vocals were originally improvised by Westbrook, and only later edited into compositions by Cooper. Despite their protracted and rigorous gestation, Cooper manages to make his arrangements sound spontaneous, which gives them an exciting liveness – a nice antidote to the hyper-detailed compositional styles that dominate much avant music. Some of the more clearly structured tracks are more musically compelling (‘Modern Translation’, ‘The time I gave up on stage’); but these balance nicely with the freer form of tracks like ‘Bordering The Afterworld’ and ‘Love And Comfort (Baby)’. Star Quality: Speculations for guitar and voice’s subtitle raises a question: what exactly is being speculated here? Aurally, the relentless barrage of sounds makes the music feel manifestly present, resolutely in the here-and-now, demanding that you pay attention. But perhaps Star Quality is speculative in the sense that there is an implied futurity – the improvisatory freedom of the compositions suggests that they are still in development, a development which will never be complete. We are not supposed to hear this album as finished: instead, Cooper and Westbrook are in the process of reimagining and reshaping the traditions within which they operate. – Jonty Watt, THE CUSP https://thecuspmagazine.com/reviews/star-quality-speculations-for-guitar-and-voice-review-an-improvisatory-electronic-melange/#google_vignette

The British trumpeter Laura Jurd was commissioned to compose a nonet composed of an improvisational quartet of saxophone, piano, double bass and drums paired with a wind ensemble of two trumpets, two trombones and a tuba. After the premiere at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, this concert recording followed in The Vortex. From the start, everything seems to go in different directions, but the connection between score and improvisation is maintained. A complex cycle of free discharges and compactly coherent clusters performed by “game changers” that are active both solo and in duo or other combinations. – Georges Tonla Briquet, JAZZ HALO

Star Quality- Speculations For Guitar And Voice is a collaboration between soprano singer Eleanor Westbrook and avant-garde guitarist Keir Cooper. It’s a ten-track album which flirts and shirts between the playful, alien, and the jaunting ‘n’ jarring. The album comes presented in a glossy four-panel digipak- taking in a white backdrop, grey text, and white text within a red box. Inside we find a two-page write-up about the collaborations and credits.  We move from chillingly moody strums ‘n’ picks meets edgy wailings of “Of Now And Then”. Onto the glitching ‘n’ plucking guitar meets cascading/ layered warbling’s & lightly hissing breaths of “Modern Translation”. Though to the languishing-yet-layered strums meet operatic gymnastics of “Love And Comfort (Baby)”. Finishing off with the cut-up wails ‘n’ moans, skipping vocal pitches, and strum ‘n’ dart of “The Time I Gave Up The Stage”. Star Quality certainly is a distinctive and highly original sonic blend. I do hope this isn’t a one-off, and these two collaborate again- as I’ve never heard anything quite like it. – Roger Batty. MUSIQUEMACHINE https://www.musiquemachine.com/reviews/reviews_template.php?id=10848

The guitarist and composer Keir Cooper has been an experimental musician for a while (I haven’t been able to find out the details yet). He is involved in projects such as punk theater, flamenco agit-pop, experimental fiction and anti-colonial filmmaking. He is a member of the jazz punk band A Sweet Niche and has written librettos for Microsong Cycle by the composer Oliver Sellwood. The soprano and improviser Eleanor Westbrook studied music and dance and has performed on theater, opera and experimental stages around the world. What the collaboration between the two, “Star Quality – Speculations for Guitar and Voice”, has to offer is actually already well expressed in the subtitle. However, a few sentences should be formulated about the creative way in which the work is performed in order to make it more appealing to fans of unusual music. According to the official information, the album should appeal to the same people who, for example, appreciate Robert Wyatt’s album “The End of An Ear” or the music of Diamanda Galas Elliot Sharp, Annie Clark, John Zorn, Derek Bailey, Nina Hagen, Elaine Mitchener and Fred Frith. The soundtracks for “Star Quality – Speculations for Guitar and Voice” were created separately, with the exception of the last track. The singer only used the words in the first piece, where a traditional folk song “Willow Tree” is reworked in an experimental way. Otherwise, the singing lady got by without words. In order to create the remaining pieces, guitarist Keir Cooper asked soprano Westbrook to record her improvisations and send them to him via the Internet. Cooper then digitally edited the vocals and added numerous sound effects. At times, his joy of wild experiments may have gotten a little carried away. His most important rule was that the sounds on the album should only be from the voice and guitar. In “Willow Tree”, however, one of the female voices was generated by a computer via the Internet, a process that is now known as artificial intelligence. Cooper did not follow his rule too strictly after all. Cooper also edited his guitar tracks electronically. Perhaps “Star Quality – Speculations for Guitar and Voice” is an example of how to use modern computer programs (or even artificial intelligence) without losing sight of the human creative element. The soprano is – according to the official website – also a trained clown (or clowness?), which may have been beneficial to the creation of this album. Whether some of the effects come across as exaggerated is up to the individual viewer. In any case, I sometimes come across strange Dadaist humor and extreme vocal acrobatics that probably know no bounds. In the end, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish what is natural in the music (especially the singing) and what could be the result of post-production. All in all, “Star Quality – Speculations for Guitar and Voice” offers an imaginative and humorous vocal artist and a creative guitarist who together break through conventional listening habits by distorting their own sound sources beyond recognition or by extracting unimagined dimensions from them.– Siggy Zielinski, BABYBLAUE SEITEN https://www.babyblaue-seiten.de/index.php?content=review&left=year&albumId=21877&year=2024

Keir Cooper is the British guitarist behind the A Sweet Niche project , which presented a relatively alternative vision of the English jazz scene, looking more towards rock and punk than towards the heads of the gondola reinventing Acid-Jazz. Rewires, released in 2005, presented this vision of things alongside Eleanor Westbrook, a singer with an adventurous voice. A soprano by training, the young woman takes Cooper into a more radical universe with Star Quality, which questions improvisation and a more lyrical approach, like the traditional “Willow Tree: A Dialogue” which is inspired by ancient music to engage in a strange lush of voices, dubbed and superimposed. Quickly, one thinks of an unlikely meeting between Laurie Anderson and Derek Bailey, like this “Love And Comfort” where a guitar full of breaks encircles the babble with a metallic voice, made unpredictable by the electronic effects and the beautiful escapes worthy of Zappaïan digressions. But Keir Cooper keeps in his playing a rock structure that he looks for in the depths. As the title announces, Star Quality is a speculation for guitar and voice: it is a duo in invention and experimentation, which allows us to reflect on the field of possibilities of singing and guitar, tested by all pop music. There are moments of great richness in this record, like Westbrook’s performance in “Modern Translation” and things that require maturation, in a remarkable process of experimentation. – Franpi Barriaux, CITIZEN JAZZ https://www.citizenjazz.com/Keir-Cooper-Eleanor-Westbrook.html