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Rating: What to say about Jim O'Rourke? In a music world where the line between mainstream music (more vulgarly known as 'commercial') and underground is blurred, the musician born in Chicago in 1969 and currently residing in Tokyo, Japan, has been a constant presence since the late 1980s. He has pursued a well-defined artistic path without ever deviating from what can be described as a double track: on one side, being a protagonist both as a musician and as a producer of fundamental pages in American underground music; on the other, being the son of Mayo Thompson and the Red Krayola, and on the other side of John Fahey, he has always pursued an influential musical discourse (already starting from Gastr del Sol) that has become increasingly abstract and at the same time conceptual.
Extremely prolific, alongside a series of publications through Drag City, he has, in recent years, released exclusively via the web and through his Bandcamp channel various material recorded from the 1990s until today, mostly tied to experimental experiences. These publications are named 'Steamroom', which is also the name of his studio in Tokyo.
As of now, this series of publications has reached its 34th chapter. The latest was released on April 4, 2017. A long 42-minute session recorded between March and April that consists of an initial embryonic version of the soundtrack for the upcoming visual work by artist Makino Takashi called 'Endless Cinema'.
None of his works can be defined as easy to approach. O'Rourke's experimental will inevitably makes him distant from anything that can be defined as easy-listening and denies the very existence of the song form.
Moreover, when he attempted ('Simple Songs', 2015) to engage with a more classic style akin to light music, the results were merely adequate, unremarkable, and certainly marginal compared to his usual production.
The work in question instead falls into a third series of publications by Jim O’Rourke and concerns the equally broad and difficult to reconstruct chapter of collaborations.
Kassel Jaeger is the pseudonym of the French avant-garde musician Francois Bonnet, one of the leading experimenters in the electroacoustic field and considered a strength in the research work at the Grm-Ina studios, where he serves as the artistic director.
Over the years, Bonnet has accompanied this activity with a series of literary publications literally dedicated to exploring sound in all its forms and what the different modes of listening are. A sort of journey back in the history of man and sound, from the history of primitive man and ancient mythologies to the explosion of the digital era and audiovisual installations.
The series of publications, called 'The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago' (Urbanomic, 2016), was inevitably followed by this record release, which came out on Editions Mego last March.
It was inevitable, after all, that sooner or later the two would find themselves collaborating, considering the fact that, even starting from two different premises and experiences, they finally reached the same point of arrival. And the terminological references to the marine world are not accidental in a work that, ideally divided (but also for reasons of 'state' - physically in this case) into two parts, is deliberately inspired by this type of setting.
One might define it as a 'liquid' work at this point, referring to a kind of ambient that might call to mind episodes like Lou Reed's 'Hudson River Wind Meditations', which he recorded for his tai-chi sessions, practically the other side of 'Metal Machine Music'. In truth, it seems more appropriate to consider Brian Eno's 'The Ship' and episodes of concrete music focused on avant-garde minimalism, which are well aware of the conceptual content of reference and often configured as unrepeatable 'happenings', not departing from what we could at this point define as the epicenter.
'Wakes On Cerulean' is a purely intellectual work and perhaps in some way also sectarian. Its goal is to analyze the different modes of listening, and this is something that is supposed to involve the entire human population. But perhaps here lies the difference between hearing and listening. There is no randomness, after all, in this work, which requires the manifest will and concentration of its audience, who approach it like a student of history and at the same time of classical letters to a Homeric poem.
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