Somehow Jim O'Rourke's music completely passed me up until I heard United Red Army and his beautiful rendition of Bill Fay's Pictures of Adolph Again, but now I have seen the light, and you people might have to put up with a flood of Jim O'Rourke albums. I'm feeling a bit foolish that it took me this many years to notice his music, but having quickly fallen in love with his work, I'll do my best to spread the word. Here's The Visitor (connect the dots for the Bowie tie-in).
From Ben Ratliff at the New York Times:
Consisting of one 32-minute track, “The Visitor” took three years to make, including a year to mix. Mr. O’Rourke had exhausted his savings, and for one of those years, he said, he was prevented from earning an income in Japan because he didn’t have a work visa. (It finally came through early last year.) He lived off royalties from his past albums, some of which have sold upward of 50,000 copies in America.
“The Visitor” runs through chapters of folk, chamber-pop, progressive rock and jazz bucolia, and it’s crazily broad: a Leo Kottke fan might like it, a Pat Metheny fan might like it, a Morton Feldman fan might like it. As the piece moves along, holding together with its long-form logic, it can be difficult to discern that most of the music relates back to the album’s simple opening chords and theme. That theme develops through different rhythms and arrangements for an array of instruments — piano, pedal-steel guitar, organ, cello, banjo, clarinet — some of which he learned how to play for the purposes of this record.
The trombone, for example, which comes in after about 20 minutes, took six months of practice before Mr. O’Rourke could play the lines he’d written for it in a perfect take. (He kept a no-edit rule.) The trombone is mixed low, but it’s the loudest instrument he used; when he was ready to record it, he waited until his next-door neighbor left for her grocery run.
Mr. O’Rourke’s production style is precise and dry; he creates a sound picture in which tiny sonic details matter. But where his [...] records are concerned, everything matters: the pacing, the length, the sound, the cover images. For this reason he won’t allow “The Visitor,” or any of his albums, to be sold as downloads, on iTunes or anywhere else. He’s taking a stand against the sound quality of MP3s; he’s also taking a stand in favor of artists being able to control the medium and reception of their work.
“You can no longer use context as part of your work,” he said, glumly, “because it doesn’t matter what you do, somebody’s going to change the context of it. The confusion of creativity, making something, with this Internet idea of democratization ...” he trailed off, disgusted. “It sounds like old-man stuff, but I think it’s disastrous for the possibilities of any art form.”
His record company approves, perhaps a reflection of his being one of [their] best-selling artists. “Frankly I’m really pleased about it,” said Rian Murphy, the label’s director of sales. “It may affect the way we’re able to promote it, and it may affect the wider range of listeners that come to get the record — if they can’t point and click to it — but it’s good to have someone standing up for that.”
Mr. O’Rourke’s music is full of sly reference and disguised intention. On his albums with vocals, the lyrics drip with misanthropy, which has upset some listeners. He loves the concept of the unreliable narrator, though he thinks many listeners aren’t ready for it. (“People want to believe that music is coming out of the creator’s soul and all that nonsense,” he complained. “I mean, I’m going to express myself whether I want to or not.”)
But “The Visitor” has no vocals — partly because he was tired of the reaction to his sense of humor and partly because, as he put it, “I had nothing to sing about.”
The titles of his four albums for Drag City refer to films by Nicolas Roeg, one of his favorite directors. “Bad Timing,” “Eureka” and “Insignificance” are actually titles of Roeg movies, but “The Visitor” has a more subtle connection. In Mr. Roeg’s science-fiction film “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” it is the name of an album made by Jerome Newton (an alien played by David Bowie) as a kind of goodbye message to be sent by the radio back to his dying planet.
Even after the lecture about unreliable narrators, one has to ask: Does the title signify that this is Mr. O’Rourke’s message from exile to those he’s left behind?
He cackled again. “I do enjoy that interpretation,” he said, “because it seems so pathetic.”
Technical Information:
Artist: Jim O'Rourke
Album: The Visitor
Year: 2009
Audio Codec(s): FLAC
Encoding: Lossless
Rip: EAC
Bitrate: 607 kb/s
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Bits per sample: 16
Channels: 2
File size: 165 MB
Length: 0:38:03
Tracklisting:
01. The Visitor (38:03)
The Visitor Megaupload Link