LE PIANO ENGLOUTI (2020)

ON THIS RECORD JIM GETS A CO-CREDIT BUT IS KEEN TO PLAY DOWN HIS ROLE IN MAKING THE WORK OF A HERO (AND THE WIFE OF A HERO) COME TO LIFE:

Brunhild Ferrari was kind to me even back then.

That’s so nice.

Yeah I don’t understand. She was always really nice to me. I mean I never got to know Mr. Ferrari much at all—I only really met him once or twice—but she was always kind to me. Still is.

You had that album with her from this year.

It’s from a couple years ago but it was released this year, yeah.

Had you two ever worked on music together before?

No, it was really just a concert. It’s really just a live show. Basically, it was pieces of hers—tape—with a person improvising. Like a lot of pieces Luc made, it was basically that. She was playing the tape and I was improvising. So really it was as simple as that. I never actually worked with her, I just did the shows with her.

Can you share how she was looking out for you?

She would make sure I was OK. I really had so little French and—maybe it's changed—but if you’re in Paris with no French, you're going to be ignored real quick (laughter). 

I CAN CONFIRM: I HAVE TRAVELLED THROUGHOUT FRANCE EXTENSIVELY OVER THE LAST DECADE AND THE ONLY PLACE MY DEPRESSING MONOGLOTTALISM HAS GIVEN ME TROUBLE IS PARIS. 

THE SOUND OF THE RECORD IS AS THE TITLE SUGGESTS - PRE-RECORDED PIANO IS ENGULFED BY WAVES OF SOUND TAKEN FROM FIELD RECORDINGS OF THE SEA AND WEATHER AND MIXED WITH DRONING ELECTRONICS AND FIZZING SYNTH NOISES. EFFECTS SWEEP IN AND OUT, BAKING THE WHOLE SOUND TOGETHER: A PIANO INSIDE THE OCEAN, OR A TORNADO TAKING PLACE INSIDE THE LAPTOP.

I LIKE IT AND IT DOESN'T SOUND LIKE A MERE LIVE SET GUSSIED UP.
 

STEAMROOM 47 (2020)

I READ A VERY INTERESTING INTERVIEW WITH JIM O'ROURKE YESTERDAY IN THE MUSIC NEWSLETTER TONE GLOW. THERE WAS QUITE A LOT OF MATERIAL TO LEAN ON SO I SHAN'T USE IT ALL NOW. PERHAPS IT WILL REFRAME SOME THINGS IN THE FUTURE, AND HAS CLARIFIED A FEW SUSPICIONS OF THE PAST.

HAD I HEARD STEAMROOM 47 PRIOR TO READING IT I'D HAVE BEEN POSITIVE ABOUT IT ALL THE SAME: IT'S PROBABLY MY FAVOURITE STEAMROOM SO FAR THAT WASN'T OUT AS SOMETHING ELSE ALREADY. IT PRESENTS FRACTURED PIANO PLAYING INTERMESHING WITH ELECTRONICS. THE PLAYING ITSELF IS STRANGE AND ODDLY BRITTLE - LIKE A FUMBLING ATTEMPT TO DEVELOP A BAROQUE MELODY THAT COLLAPSES (BUT INTERESTINGLY) AND RISES AND FALLS. IT IS INTERESTING STUFF.

THE INTERVIEW PROVIDES SOME INSIGHT ON HOW THIS PARTICULAR RELEASE WAS MADE. REMEMBER WHEN I SUGGESTED A LONG TIME AGO THAT PROCESS AND HOW THE SOUND WAS MADE FEELS OF PRIMARY IMPORTANCE RATHER THAN THE END PRODUCT OR HOW IT MIGHT MAKE YOU FEEL? WELL:

Well there's this whole area of research, this grouping of disciplines called MIR—music information retrieval.

I'm not familiar with it.

The results of that are those things on your phone where you can ask, “What’s that song?” and figure out what it is.

Oh, apps like SoundHound?

Yeah, so basically that world of research is called MIR. Which is a combination of other disciplines like FFT (Fast Fourier transform) analysis and delta signals and all that shit. As a sort of adjunct to my near-lifelong obsession with Roland Kayn and the idea of music based on cybernetics, I was researching various things about MIR over the past couple years—not because I'm interested in it as a technology, but because of the parts of technology that make it up.

What that album is, and the name’s sort of a clue—I’m surprised no one’s caught on, it’s not that obscure. But basically I made an FFT analysis of—

Glenn Gould?

Yeah, Glenn Gould! So I did an FFT analysis of all the Goldberg Variations. But what I did was, for each particular variation, based on the simple ideas of—and they were simple because I was just doing tests—how many modulations and blah blah blah. When you're doing FFT analysis, it's basically like a time domain analysis. Depending on the sample rate you're working at, you’re cutting up music into slices of time, almost like plastic overlays. It’s kind of like when you see those things when you make slices of the brain and you’re putting see-through, plastic pieces on top of each other for each slice.

So with the Fourier transform, you're taking time slices and you're reading the energy levels of the frequencies as sine waves—sinusoidal—for each slice. Then to recreate it, these slices and the sine waves and particular amplitudes are recreated in the same time domain. But what I was doing was changing the time domain as well as resynthesizing it—not with sine waves, but with a wave table of a hundred and fifty different wave forms that were dependent upon both the frequency and the amplitude in regards to something particular about that Goldberg variation.

So I was recreating those performances of the Goldberg Variations with this kind of skewered, nutso, FFT resynthesis. And then what I did (laughs) was once I resynthesized those—which is that kind of crazy, squelchy, noisy part—I ran that through a program which tries to read musical material out of the audio. And that made a new score that was played on the

SO THE PIECE ENDS UP BEING THIS TWICE REMOVED GOLDBERG VARIATION THAT PERHAPS TRUMPS THE IDEA OF ALGORITHMS WRITING OUR FUTURE MASTERPIECES BY DOING THE THING HUMANS DO BEST AND TWISTING IT AWAY FROM OBVIOUS LEVELS OF INTENT.  

THE THING IS THOUGH IT SOUNDS REALLY GOOD. AS STATED - I AM NOT A PROCESS GUY. I LIKE EXPRESSION AND RESULT. FORTUNATELY JIM'S GOALS AND MINE ALIGN HERE FOR AN EASY CERTIFIED: GOOD!

THE SUPREME INDIFFERENCE LIVE (2020)

THOUGH ACTUALLY RECORDED IN NEW YORK IN 2003 WHEN JIM WAS RUNNING WITH THE SONIC YOUTHS AND VARIOUS AVANT SUPERSTARS. HERE JIM WORKS WITH KIM GORDON AND ALAN LICHT WITH A DOUBLE DRUM LINE-UP OF TIM BARNES AND CHRIS CORSANO. 

THERE'S A FINE LINE BETWEEN SKILLED HORSEPLAY AND ACTUAL FUCKING AROUND AND I DON'T KNOW IF I'M GOOD ENOUGH TO SPOT THE DIFFERENCE. WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS A LIVE CONCERT THAT MESHES THAT KIM GORDON SPOKEN WORD THING WITH THE SCRAPINGS AND KLANGINGS OF A 'NO WAVE' TYPE GIG. 

ULTIMATELY IT SOUNDS LIKE AN EARLY SONIC YOUTH SONG, THE KIND THAT LEE WOULD HAVE MADE, ALL HEADY BEAT POETRY AND TECTONIC GUITARS AND TRIBAL DRUMMING. THERE ARE SOME WELL-EXPLORED MOODS AND IT DOESN'T STICK AROUND TO BECOME A MASSIVE CHORE LIKE MELBOURNE DIRECT.

COMPLETELY INESSENTIAL BUT ENTIRELY OKAY.

IN COBALT AURA SLEEPS (2020)

ALLOW ME TO QUOTE FROM THE RECENT REVIEW OF SHUTTING DOWN HERE ON THE MUSIC REVIEW WEBSITE PITCHFORK:

In 1990, Jim O’Rourke visited the studio of the Groupe de recherches musicales (INA GRM) in Paris. The experience was monumental for the guitarist, budding composer, and 21-year-old college student. Back at DePaul University in Chicago, O’Rourke’s teachers, he once told an interviewer, “were just trying to mold you into becoming professors.” In Paris, he was meeting his heroes, radical luminaries of the mid-century avant-garde, particularly the concentric genres of musique concrète and acousmatic music. O’Rourke’s latest, Shutting Down Here, is billed as his return to INA GRM 30 years after he made his first pilgrimage.

WELL THIS MAY BE THE BILLING BUT I GUESS IT IS NOT STRICTLY TRUE AS HERE WE HAVE JIM COLLABORATING WITH THE CURRENT ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF INA GRM (AND, I MIGHT ADD, NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME).

THE COVER IMAGE OF EMPTY (ABANDONED?) BOATS IS A RARE EXAMPLE OF A JIM O'ROURKE COVER IMAGE HAVING SOME SENSE OF CONNECTION WITH THE MUSIC CONTAINED WITHIN: THERE'S A SENSE OF FLOATING, AN EERIE SENSE OF SOMETHING HAVING VACATED RECENTLY AND DISTURBINGLY. DISSONANT DRONES BOB AND THE STERN GENTLY THUDS AGAINST THE JETTY. SOMETHING IS WRONG.

THE WORK SEEMS A BIT MORE INVOLVED THAN THE AVERAGE STEAMROOM DRONE RECORD BUT ULTIMATELY I'M NOT GREATLY MOVED BY IT. O'ROURKE MIGHT BE REVISITING SOME THEMES FROM HIS YOUTH BUT I DON'T THINK HE'S NECESSARILY BRINGING ANYTHING NEW TO THEM OTHER THAN TECHNOLOGY TO REALISE IT AND PERHAPS RECORDING FIDELITY. 

AS SOUND DESIGN THIS IS PRETTY GOOD: WHOLE, RICH, FULLY REALISED, WITH AN EQUIVALENT STEREO IMAGE TO THAT OF A BEAUTIFUL DEEP FOCUS PHOTOGRAPH. BUT THE CONTEXT I HEAR IT IN (MUSIC) MEANS I LOOK FOR CERTAIN THRILLS THAT NEVER QUITE ARRIVE.

SHUTTING DOWN HERE (2020)

SHUTTING DOWN HERE WAS REVIEWED ON PITCHFORK TODAY SO LET US QUICKLY SEE WHAT IS BENEATH THE HOOD OF THE 8.0 SCORE IT WAS AWARDED.

His album is almost memoiristic, even though it eschews the literal for the heady crafts of recording and arrangement.

NOW I AM A 37 YEAR OLD MAN AND JABBING PITCHFORK IN THE RIBS IS A GAME BEST PLAYED BY YOUNGER AND MORE BITTER PEOPLE THAN I (AND I STILL CONSIDER MYSELF YOUNG AND A LITTLE BITTER) BUT I DO NOT THINK THAT BEING "LITERAL" (THAT IS TO SAY, MEMOIRISTIC IN AN OVERT, HERE IS MY LIFE KIND OF WAY) AND BEING CEREBRAL ABOUT RECORDING AND ARRANGEMENT NEED BE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.

 

WHAT MR. FELSENTHAL IS GRABBING AT IS THAT O'ROURKE IS WRITING A RECORD THAT REFLECTS THE VARIOUS PASSAGES OF STUDY AND APPRECIATION HE HAS ACCUMULATED OVER HIS 30+ YEARS IN THE BIZ; A REFLECTION ON HIS ORIGINS AND SUCH.

THIS RESULTS IN A MIX OF TAPE-Y SOUNDS OVERLAPPING WITH ELECTRONIC SOUNDS AND SOME ORGANIC BITS OF PIANO AND STRING. I THINK WE USED TO CALL THIS APPROACH 'ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC' OR 'ACOUSMATIC'. 

IT IS QUITE CEREBRAL AND THAT'S GENERALLY WHAT I EXPECT THROUGHOUT THIS PROJECT. MY EXPERIENCES WITH JIM ARE SIMPLY NOT TO EXPECT THE INDUSTRY STANDARDS FOR NAKED AND HONEST EXPRESSION, EVEN WHEN HE VEERS INTO STYLES THAT APPEAR TO CORRESPOND WITH IT. 

 

IF THIS IS A MEMOIR, IT'S A MEMOIR OF BEING EXCITED BY THE POSSIBILITY OF LESS DIRECT FORMS OF EXPRESSION; MOTIVATED BY ALIENATION, PERHAPS? SOMEONE ON BANDCAMP SAYS HE HEARS 'QUOTES FROM MORTON FELDMAN' IN IT: I WOULDN'T KNOW ABOUT THAT SORT OF THING, I AM JUST ONE MAN AND ONE BLOG.

IT'S A PRETTY SOLID RECORD AND GETS BETTER AS IT TRUNDLES ALONG AS HIS CLINICAL ATMOSPHERES AND TEXTURES MEET THE GUT ON STRING LULL OF A VIOLIN.