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"It's against my nature to be doing only one thing at a time," says jet-setting avant-garde musician, composer and producer Jim O'Rourke. Fresh off a plane from England, where he spent two weeks recording with Stereolab's Tim Gane and the High Llamas' Sean O'Hagan and performed at a music festival, the 29-year-old Chicagoan sounds relaxed on the phone from his apartment--even though he's leaving the next day. In his home for only 24 hours, O'Rourke will turn around and fly to Europe for a two-week tour with bands on an obscure Austrian label, after which he'll return to America to crisscross the country with German electronic minimalist and close friend Markus Popp of Oval. "I was planning on not touring much, but it's ended up the most hectic year I've ever had," O'Rourke says. He's got a lot to show for this flurry of activity. Since 1996, O'Rourke has released a solo record, Bad Timing; two albums, Upgrade & Afterlife and the more recent Camoufleur (Drag City), with Louisville guitarist and songwriter David Grubbs as Gastr del Sol; and an EP credited to O'Rourke and Sonic Youth. The recent sessions with Gane and O'Hagan will yield an album under the name Turn On, and it's one of four in the works for O'Rourke. He's collaborating with fellow Chicago busybody John McEntire in a new project called the Deacons, writing and recording another solo effort and fleshing out material with Popp on the forthcoming tour for a further addition to his expansive discography. In his leisure time, O'Rourke has also produced records for John Fahey, Edith Frost and Smog, and he's reissued out-of-print records by like-minded avant-garde musicians Henry Kaiser, Derek Bailey and Mayo Thompson on the Drag City-affiliated Dexter's Cigar imprint. With all this going on, the critic and consumer must raise the quantity vs. quality issue. It's especially poignant given O'Rourke's choice of field. In the wrong hands, experimental and improvisational music can rival the dullness of a stale piece of melba toast. The better artists evince something more from their instruments or machines than just a random series of blips, bleeps and high-pitched buzzes. O'Rourke has emerged as one of America's most respected and revered players based on the scope and inventiveness of his work, which ranges from gentle guitar compositions to complex arrangements for strings, keyboards and horns to electronic sound sculptures. His two most recent releases are perhaps his most accessible. Bad Timing floats along on a wave of enunciated guitar notes and sparse violin and trumpet accompaniment, a vaguely neoclassical effort that follows in the tradition of Fahey and Loren Mazzacane Connors. O'Rourke says he conceived the music over the course of a year, playing guitar and writing in his home and then testing the material on unsuspecting audiences while on tour as a member of one of his various band projects. "I always had this extreme interest in pseudo-Americana," he says. "I'm a fan of John Fahey and Van Dyke Parks. I don't make records that reflect my interests until I really feel like I've found a place that's really me, not just me imitating someone else." Even more distinctive is what's being billed as Gastr del Sol's swan song, Camoufleur, an album of art-pop compositions riddled with unorthodox instrumentation, mind-boggling song constructions and repetitive vocal phrasings worthy of a Gertrude Stein novel. Previous Gastr records, some of which included McEntire and ex-Tortoise co-conspirator Bundy K. Brown, encompassed all sorts of experimental styles, but the finale sticks to a lush sonic terrain that's hardly comparable to anything, although the Beach Boys and Scott Walker could serve as touchstones. It's a nearly brilliant record, but it had its costs; the duo's friendship reportedly has disintegrated, and O'Rourke sounds nonplused about Gastr's dissolution. "It was taking up too much time," he says. "Since the new record was a studio construction, it became like a daily job for eight months." For someone as frenetic as O'Rourke, such a task is remarkably limiting. He, McEntire and a cast of other Chicagoans such as Brown and the Sea and Cake's Archer Prewitt are among this country's most prolific and praiseworthy young musicians, and O'Rourke says it's more than just coincidence. "There's a shared desire for hard work in Chicago," he says. "There's a real work ethic in this city." |
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