Send "Jim O'Rourke " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Pardon the archaic suggestion, but if you've opened a physical copy of Jim O'Rourke's return to glory, The Visitor, you'll understand that it's a demanding release even before you've heard its introductory trace of acoustic guitar. Indeed, if you're legally listening to your own edition of The Visitor, then you're holding either a compact disc or an LP. Whether for reasons of sound quality, tradition, or both, O'Rourke and Drag City forewent an mp3 release of his new album. You have to, like, pick it up. And inside, on the minimal liner notes, O'Rourke makes his second demand: "Please listen on speakers, loud," he entreats, as if now recording under the name Jimm O))). In the end, these prerequisites presage The Visitor, a unified 38-minute instrumental piece that plays hide-and-go-seek with dozens of instruments, textures, and motifs before refusing to deliver the climax you might have expected. An arrogant pop record, The Visitor's intricate, long-form composition rewards repeated close listens through its own insistence on subtlety and craft.Calling The Visitor a pop record is as much of a stretch as it is a reduction, but it's an important distinction to make here. Despite his involvement with well over 100 albums in the past two decades, The Visitor is just the fifth in a string of highly accessible if equally nuanced O'Rourke releases on Drag City. That series began in 1997 with the rustic instrumental Bad Timing and, until now, ended with 2001's rock opus, Insignificance. Along with Eureka and the EP Halfway to a Threeway, that quartet offered listeners easier inroads to O'Rourke, especially relative to his noise or improvised output, the textural radiance of Gastr del Sol or the kitchen-sink compositions of Brise-Glace. But they weren't your average pop records, either: Bad Timing twisted parochial roots music ideas into a gorgeous four-track cycle, while Halfway to a Threeway paired instrumental elegance and emotional ruefulness in four nearly clinical tunes. Throughout, O'Rourke moved just as deliberately as he'd later move on the long-form laptop record, I'm Happy and I'm Singing and a 1, 2, 3, 4, or with drone masters Tony Conrad and Faust on Outside the Dream Syndicate Alive. Bad Timing, for instance, built for nearly 40 minutes before horns and steel guitar ricocheted against each other like pinballs. And on the wry Insignificance, he'd often open a stanza with a happy sentiment just to present the blade beneath the cloth as conclusion. With O'Rourke, patience is more necessity than virtue. On The Visitor, it is an absolute....full text |
| Tinymixtapes |
| Over the last several years, Jim O’Rourke has done little of what originally made his name synonymous with the word "ubiquitous." He hasn’t released new material for eight years, and he’s no longer producing albums at a furious rate. He’s been relatively quiet with Wilco since 2004’s A Ghost Is Born; he quit Sonic Youth in 2006; and Loose Fur hasn’t released anything for over three years. In the past, O’Rourke was even known for his vocal cheerleading of lesser-knowns, either by using his reissue label, Dexter’s Cigar (a subsidiary of Drag City), to introduce listeners to new artists or by simply lauding esoteric musicians like Luciano Cilio and Bill Fay. Now? We’re lucky to hear anything about O’Rourke’s tastes, let alone the music he’s working on. All of this, of course, has much to do with his move to Japan in 2006. Contrary to reports around that time, O’Rourke isn’t there making films. He has instead been doing soundtrack work (with directors like Masao Adachi and Kōji Wakamatsu), writing film criticism, and improvising music with everyone from Akira Sakata and Otomo Yoshihide, to Masami Akita (Merzbow) and Keiji Haino. He’s obviously still active, but the geographical distance and cultural barriers contribute in part to a different mythology, one based more on the ‘reclusive artist’ construction than on the omnipresence that informed O’Rourke’s past biography, which was at one point so thorough that even his move from Chicago to New York raised flags. Why, then, has it taken so long for him to release The Visitor, his first solo album since 2001’s amazing (and largely misinterpreted) Insignificance? It can all be attributed to finding the right context. In recent interviews, O’Rourke has lamented the fact that context is no longer an option because of the internet. "[It] doesn’t matter what you do," he said to The New York Times, "somebody’s going to change the context of it." He’s not talking about the ethics of downloading; he’s talking about the internet’s supposed democratizing potential, where the appropriation of art forms is standard fare and where creativity has only become vaguer. This is why, according to The New York Times, The Visitor is unavailable as a download; the decision is an extension of O’Rourke’s desire to create a context in which he has some control over the way the album is presented and experienced....full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| The last we heard from Jim O’Rourke solo, officially, was his Nicolas Roeg trilogy, Bad Timing, Eureka, and Insignificance. Common wisdom had these records being his reconciliation with song writing, though I remember thinking at the time that they were fantastic sounding records that were a bit below par on the actual songs front. (I got more mileage from his recently reissued laptop album for Mego, I’m Happy, I’m Singing And A 1, 2, 3, 4.) In hindsight, that trio of albums slots neatly into a continuum of exploration for O’Rourke – another period of restless investigation which dealt with songs as research, building blocks to dis- and re-assemble. I guess you could say the same thing about The Visitor, as it’s a fairly delimited experience – O’Rourke’s 38-minute, one-song dream of the kind of epic, conceptual song-ic arcana that used to slip under the major-label net in more forgiving times. Propelled by O’Rourke’s acoustic guitar, and woven with rich, evocative arrangements for extended band (all played by O’Rourke, mind you) that stretch his guitar phrases and figures into elaborate architectures, it’s a gorgeous album. The episodic nature of The Visitor has me flashing on the return of themes and motifs inherent to soundtracks, though that’s more a structural signifier, and the articulacy of O’Rourke’s production and arrangement recalls one of his heroes, Van Dyke Parks, simply for his ability to work with archetypal, historically loaded forms while still saying something new and personal. If The Visitor truly reminds this listener of anything, most notably in its first ten minutes or so, it’s Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark or The Hissing Of Summer Lawns (albeit shorn of full-blown songs). This is little surprise given O’Rourke’s love of music from the 1970s. If the first five years of that decade are still disingenuously misinterpreted as the dry patches to late ‘60s psych and ‘76 punk’s wet spots, O’Rourke here re-values the ‘70s singer-songwriter as artisan and fantasist, and The Visitor most of all sounds like glorious fantasia. In toto, The Visitor joins the dots between early ‘70s folk-rock, the open string resonance of Takoma, and the blissful indolence of renegade Americana at its most wasted (see David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name). Though I do worry a little about these constant comparisons: one unfortunate outcome from O’Rourke’s vocal enthusiasm is a tendency for writers to try and join the dots between his influences, rather than take O’Rourke’s music at its...full text |
Jim O'Rourke lyrics
|
| |||||||
