Developed for guitar, voice and digital sound methodologies, the album features celebrated interdisciplinary artist and guitarist, Keir Cooper and prize-winning soprano, Eleanor Westbrook.

Star Quality – Speculations for Guitar and Voice is an album that rethinks the possible relationships between vocals, instrumentation, improvisation and digital software editing - or thinks about them in a certain way for the first time. It is immensely playful (singer Eleanor Westbrook is also a trained clown), summoning the ghosts of Dada past in its radically mischievous use of collage. Hannah Höch and Tristran Tzara would have danced with joy at the games played here. It reminds fleetingly of Robert Wyatt’s avant scat adventures on his 1970 album The End Of An Ear, of Diamanda Galas and her vocal rain of fire (Star Quality is framed by an oblique sense of the operatic), of Fred Frith and the Guitar Solos crew, while composer/guitarist Keir Cooper has admitted influences such as Kathy Acker, Gerhard Richter and Anna Meredith. Yet Star Quality has myriad qualities all of its own.

The album arose from a series of vocal improvisations Cooper asked Westbrook to record and send over to him. He then laid down his own guitar parts and subjected the vocals to extensive digital editing, as evidenced on “Superstar” – a phonetic frenzy of echoes, stutters, elongations, yelps, cut-up treatments leaping at you from all sides in the mix. Here is an album whose perma-mode is one of surprise – consternation, delight. Years in the making, Star Quality is the most ambitious music composition project Keir Cooper has undertaken, and his first as a solo composer.