Jim O'Rourke
“6 Oscillators '87”
[2006]
A friend puts it in the most complimentary of ways: “Fuck Jim O’Rourke.” During the past 20 years, the soft-spoken O’Rourke has rifled through every fringe he could find and managed to make innumerable contributions to experimental music: He is or has been half of Gastr del Sol, a Derek Bailey collaborator, a minimalist composer, a laptop guru, a stunning songwriter, a Loren Connors digital transfer expert, a Wilco producer, a Sonic Youth member and the person partially responsible for the release of the only Dream Syndicate material commercially available. And now this? C’mon.
O’Rourke recorded this six-oscillator side of noise in 1987, when he was an 18-year-old at DePaul. Tones are penetrating but careful, microtonal spurns clipping and crawling and slinking alongside one another, pings, loops and shards of white bouncing upward from a matrix of metal spheres grinding in glacial motion, sparks popping all white and red and yellow. It shows the compositional patience and real-time thought that relative neophytes like Wolf Eyes are just now understanding. They bit first on ultra-anglo hooks like shock value, but not O’Rourke. Instead, over 23 minutes of proto-American harsh noise, O’Rourke wades through complex themes with protracted patience. Yep, 18 years before your "new" noise idea.
Posted by Grayson Currin in
noise on Tue: 09-19-06: 04:00 AM CDT |
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