Jim O'Rourke

Wow the bit he plays starting at 8:57 sounds a lot like one of my own:

https://soundcloud.com/factual-1/open

Now you just need a masked wrestler to preface your work with a personalized SWOT analysis.

fuck

does anyone live in Tokyo?

http://www.tinymixtapes.com/news/jim-orourke-perform-simple-songs-and-bad-timing-their-entirety

recent live show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM1RGmBQjww
sounds great, wonder if a world tour is in the works? :P
apparently he's got a solo acoustic LP coming out next year on VDSQ which is good news.

all downhill from here live!!! fuck

Thanks Tyler, that sounds great - really like the pretty droney swirly interlude about ten minutes in - very Dark Star! I miss this kind of stuff on Simple Songs.

Another slightly dispiriting interview here:
http://bombmagazine.org/article/9761825/jim-o-rourke

Whoa, acoustic album eh? Would not have thought that was coming. Nice.

Also, I am pretty sure that at this point I am not interested in hearing Jim talk about his own work. It just ... does not help.

haha yeah...
no idea what to expect about the solo acoustic thing. for some reason i kind of doubt it'll be along the lines of the solo playing on bad timing, but who knows?

he sounds like such a miserable bastard

he sounds happy :)

god this performance is amazing

Three recent collabs here: (oh this looks so tempting)

oh holy SHIT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xizxQ8L78T8

i cant believe these were just sitting on youtube for 9 months before i saw them. super raunchy version of halfway to a threeway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeKCOaRPflY

Never pegged him for a Dylan fan, but JO covers Sad Eyed Lady on this new Mojo giveaway CD:

http://www.mojo4music.com/23985/mojo-celebrates-bob-dylans-blonde-on-blonde/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTDDdnKWxDc
synth patches by Jim O'Rourke

Cool retrospective review of Bad Timing by Mark Richardson: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22870-bad-timing/

This seesaw between mischievous subversion and slack-jawed beauty is the key to O’Rourke’s best music. His sense of humor is both generous and slightly dark; there’s irony in his touch, but it’s not a negating one. It’s more about being open to hearing every possibility in a given piece of music. In a 2001 interview O’Rourke was asked if Bad Timing had an element of parody. “Not a parody at all, or infatuation, it’s more like trying to reconcile what is imagined, learned, real, and imaginary.” And then he added, “Is it really that impossible to believe that something can be funny and sincere at the same time?”

UMMMM THIS IS NEW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vca6NLVKYrI

^full band

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGr-BadCPHQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llkXDZ4w3IM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kX4ivPin3U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AO4OPCjTuU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSdB29FlILc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4hNo1vKyOM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg72sUd6w3I

Woah!

I was at that show! So great.

Lots of video from this tour on youtube, this was uploaded 10 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2c2XblYcOc

Yeah those are the only live recordings I'd heard or seen before last year when a proshot video of full band Not Sport, Marital Art and Halfway to a Threeway showed up on YouTube. Having even more full band live versions of the Roeg records is blowing my mind.

New album with Kassel Jaeger (sp?) on Mego is truly gorgeous and strange and one of my favorite things this year.

already posted this in another thread but it needs to be seen - Jim singing karaoke of "Thanks But No Thanks" by Sparks in 2000. Thurston on Casio.

22:52
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_yuTYi4xpM

I never got into the Sparks but that is a very good impression with showmanship

Has to be "Halfway to a threeway". "Not Sport, Martial Art" is unfuckwithable

"Not Sport, Marital Art" is my favorite song of all time. I always thought the pun in the title was cool but confusing - so many people spell it "martial" despite the fact that every copy of the record spells it "marital." it's not a typo

but yeah i would've voted for Halfway to a Threeway - despite its length it has his best work on it. Insignificance is my favorite of the Roeg LP's - I think Eureka is massively overrated, maybe due to Women of the World.

Eureka presaged a whole era of epiphany-core ukulele and xylophone filled corporate commercials and movie trailers.

Behave - plenty of records can be accused of that, but how many people have actually heard Eureka? Anyway, it's long been my favourite (hence why I'm reacting so spikily!) but it's been overtaken by Bad Timing and Threeway in the last couple of years.

i like eureka
my favorite recent jim o'rourke is the soundtrack he did for The Creeping Garden, which i strongly recommend for the music as well as the film

yeah eureka is great, though i suppose sufjan took quite a bit from it ... i haven't heard creeping garden, I'll have to check it out!

Sufjan is definitely guilty of swiping Stereolab songs... compare "The Free Design" and the title track on Illinois. it's just ridiculous

Me either. Is it readily available?

i know it's included with the UK release of the movie, but i don't have it either
i asked (via twitter) the people who made the movie if it was going to be released separately and they just offered me that but maybe he will release a version? it's really slow and droney. the movie is about slime molds <3

you could probably email him, i think he gets back to fans p quickly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyQqRBJngkY

do you know his email? i don't!

you can reach him thru the contact on the Steamroom page

https://steamroom.bandcamp.com

helpful, thank you

some of his soundtrack stuff shows up on steamroom, so it seems possible he'd put it out there ...

hope so! i really liked it. he does whatever he wants. i admire that.

The best concert I've ever attended was O'Rourke at the Empty Bottle just before Eureka came out circa 1998. He played one song: "Women of the World." For 50 minutes. Just him, a guitar and a drum machine. The same riff, the same vocal lines, repeated over and over and over. It was the most sublime musical experience I've ever had.

I'm a huge fan and would love for him to continue with music, but I understand that sometimes you have to move on for a while.

― Bill in Chicago, Tuesday, August 7, 2007 1:16 PM (nine years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Bandcamp interview from last year

The same riff, the same vocal lines, repeated over and over and over. It was the most sublime musical experience I've ever had.

does... not... compute

Terje Rypdal-tribute with Jim contributing one track

innnnteresting.
did LL see that the Creeping Garden soundtrack she was asking about showed up on bandcamp? https://steamroom.bandcamp.com/album/steamroom-35