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Jim O'Rourke, "I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1,2,3,4" Written by Anthony D'Amico Saturday, 09 May 2009
Despite having been recorded more than a decade ago with somewhat fledgling technology, Jim's 2001 laptop masterpiece still sounds fresh and vibrant today. That is no small accomplishment, given the avalanche of laptop-based improv works that followed in its wake.
Editions Mego
Jim O'Rourke has had an utterly improbable and singular career. In the span of two decades he has collaborated with nearly every single person in underground music that I admire, ranging from Nurse With Wound to Sonic Youth to Merzbow to Joanna Newsom. He has even done soundtrack work for Werner Herzog, which makes it abundantly clear that O'Rourke was put on earth largely to make me dissatisfied with my own comparatively meager accomplishments. However, while I have generally liked everything that he has been involved with, I have never found any of his work to be stunning to a degree that would warrant such countercultural ubiquity. Of course, I had never heard this particular album, which entirely justifies his status and sets my mind firmly at ease.
The thick, merciless, and unsettling repetition and glitchiness of the opening track ("I'm Happy") favorably calls to mind both Oval and Steve Reich's "Different Trains." The obsessive looping treated guitar (I think) endlessly and subtly morphs, while lower tones create an undercurrent of menace indicating that perhaps Mr. O'Rourke is not happy after all. Eventually, there is an abrupt and jarring shift into a nervous-sounding arrhythmic stuttering pattern that is quite annoying initially. Gradually however, it is augmented by a high-end shimmer and what sounds like a melancholic bowed bass or cello. O'Rourke slowly plunges the stuttering pattern deeper into the mix and the song concludes with the somber beauty of the subterranean strings pushed into the foreground.
"And I'm Singing" is a much cheerier piece, although it is built similarly around thick harmonized loops. However, O'Rourke's bag of tricks also yields some pleasantly melodic piano, a warm purring locked-groove, some odd and inconsistent percussion, and something that sounds like a garbage can falling down a flight of stairs. It continues to escalate in cheery, bouncy intensity until it becomes extremely obnoxious and busy, but then abruptly warps into something that sounds like a sad and ruined caricature of itself. Then it gets fairly irritating again, as it devolves into an amelodic flurry of electronic sounds, buzzing, and clanging. Thankfully, it morphs into an incredibly beautiful stuttering, lurching wall of backwards guitars and plucked acoustic harmonics before it fades out.
The album concludes with a very warm and meticulously constructed drone piece ("And a 1,2,3,4") that sounds like a glacially slow and digitally manipulated field recording of the most heartbroken string quartet in the world. It's an absolutely stunning piece and is probably the most sustained period of brilliance that I have heard on a Jim O'Rourke album. It lasts over twenty minutes and ebbs, swells, and becomes digitally distorted without ever losing its melancholic grandeur or lapsing into the puckish self-sabotage displayed on the early tracks.
Ironically, this entirely computer-based release will not be available digitally (the folks at Editions Mego presumably have an excellent sense of humor), but it does come with bonus disc of similar material recorded around the same time period. The three bonus tracks are enjoyable, but not particularly essential- they lack the warmth and melodicism of the album tracks and veer into harsher, less human territory ("Let's Take It Again From The Top" sounds like it could've been a Merzbow remix of something from the album). That said, the original album is a vital work by one of contemporary music's most intriguing and influential artists.
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