Jim O'Rourke

Listened to Bad Timing on a leg of a long road trip traversing some bleak emptiness, it was magical.

i haven't listened to the whole thing but i think it's the sort of album that will be there when i need it, which is apparently not right at this particular time

“I’m glad people like ‘Eureka’,” he says, “but to me it’s a very sad record. I still meet people and they’re like, ‘I played it at my wedding, it’s so happy’, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God! People think it’s some happy, good-time record.’ So therefore, I failed. I don’t want people to be happy when they listen to my music."

good. i love this. jim o continues to rule my universe

Hah hah. I have literally never met anyone who merely thought "it's so happy" about Jim's lyric-based music. I mean, I don't think he is lying, it is just funny to imagine who these people are.

Loud popping on the first few minutes - yep. Mine jumps there too.

I'm trying to think of which Eureka song would make any sense at a wedding... "Please Patronize Our Sponsors"?

most of eureka would make sense at a wedding as long as you don't listen to the words

i mean, that nasty SNL sax solo on 'Through the Night Softly'? that's 2am running around with a lampshade on your head music!

love the record but listening to the digital version on cans makes me feel like i need to pop my ears

the vocals sound as if they're being broadcast on the radio, with that sort of fizzy compression. it's not that bad, but it sorta sounds odd. kinda dig the filtering he's got going on, with some of the piano on track three.

'through the night softly' was used for an Embassy Suites commercial. The early piano instrumental on Sam Prekop's first s/t album was used for a Tylenol commercial.

there's a '70s dadrock vibe on some of this that i am enjoying. maybe "dadrock" isn't the right term. like MOR rock that's only vaguely proggy but not rootsy either. like supertramp or something. mostly in the textures. o'rourke is the consummate allusive musician (all of his "pop" records seem like they are consciously evoking some bygone--and often out-of-fashion--style) so this doesn't surprise me.

the compression on this album (esp. the vocals) is weird, it often sounds like a thin low-bitrate MP3 even when I'm playing it from CD. o'rourke is a masterful sound engineer (among other things) so whatever effects are on here i'm assuming are deliberate. but there are some odd choices, almost like a rough mix, or like o'rourke was taking the piss on his own record (which also would not surprise me).

btw since all his other "pop" albums are named after (or in reference to) nic roeg films, what's this one a reference to? or has he abandoned that?

ah i just skimmed the online uncut interview. i guess a reference point was genesis. makes sense. listening to "last year" again, i guess i underestimated the progginess of this new one.

o'rourke is obviously a sunuvabitch (i have some stories i probably shouldn't mention here, but they don't differ in essence from a million other stories that have been shared here and elsewhere) but for me he's been something like guiding star for a long time (20 years!), in terms of the expansiveness (and strangeness) of his sensibilities.

weird that people get that general idea about him when he comes across as incredibly gracious and affable in that recent interview posted above:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3z8twRBz24

well, yeah, like a lot of people, he contains multitudes

well yeah, i just think it's interesting that he's got that reputation in the media when it seems like every interview i've heard or read with him gives me the opposite impression. almost feels like with what he's addressing in that interview with people mistaking his unreliable-narrator voice in insignificance as being "him" or everyone assuming he's working in the film industry in japan.

not claiming to have any inside route to him as a person in general.

that interview feels really stilted. interviewer sounds oddly impatient/bored.

yeah exactly, that's what makes o'rourke seem completely unlike the cantankerous/curmudgeonly person i'd been lead to believe he was. sounds like he's being interviewed by a 15 year-old for their school newspaper and he's actually actively trying to help the clueless guy out and entertaining all these drab questions.

yeah, interview is odd, and o'rourke seems nice (if very nerdy).

Hotel Blue sounding right today, haven't played this album in months. Also, don't understand the complaints about 'out of tune' bowed cymbals on The Visitor.. everything sounds in order, functional, on the album. Still love the 12 minute mark, or maybe it's 12'30"...

"functional": exactly. it's a showreel extravaganza. not out of tune. just always imagine a better key for that passage. "better" is a subjective judgement. y'all free to love the key it's in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olXUf4dDLS4

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.