|
zoom
Is it a back-handed slap to feature Jim O'Rourke, an accomplished composer, classically trained musician, whiz producer and all-around ubiquitous indie rock guy in a magazine devoted to the worst music ever? O'Rourke's latest LP on Drag City records is called Bad Timing, and his experimental music - most prominently exhibited in Gastr Del Sol - might be deemed inaccessible by some. But bad? No. Still, O'Rourke has definitely got some ideas on "bad music." His next project is, tentatively, a personal crusade upon music which has been labeled "bad" by the music world - an album of covers, as he puts it, of "songs that are generally not considered to be good songs." Songs like Bruce Hornsby's "The Way It Is." "It's just to present that these are good songs. I'm not trying to be like, 'I'm the person who can show you that these songs are good,'" says the mild-mannered O'Rourke from New York's West Park Hotel. "[If they're sub-par, it's] through bad recording or arrangements or because of the time these songs were done." He cites the Crash Test Dummies' "Superman's Song" ("the mmmm mmmm mmmm mmmm song") as another diamond in the rough. "Oh! That song is really fucking good. There's too much piano playing and there's some bad bass playing, oh man, the guy's like 'LOOK AT ME I CAN PUT SOME EXTRA NOTES IN HERE,' but for the most part, I think it's a really amazing song." At the moment, those are the only two songs O'Rourke's decided on. "They just have to come to me. I have to wait until I hear them. I've thought of some songs but the originals are good enough. I want ones where people are like 'What the fuck, Bruce Hornsby? That guy is wack!'" So where does the 28-year-old get off declaring himself the arbiter of a song's worthiness? For starters, his resume is long and impressive. A working-class Chicago kid, O'Rourke studied music at DePaul. "It had nothing to do with what I do now," he jokes of his alma mater. "It just made sure I didn't go into the music world, which I still don't think I have." More recently, O'Rourke was one half of Gastr Del Sol, a loose avant-garde rock collective whose other main member was Squirrel Bait/Slint alum and fellow eclectic David Grubbs. The two had amassed wide if uneasy acclaim for their heady, formless sound experiments since O'Rourke joined the fold for 1994's Crookt, Crackt, or Fly LP. Since 1989, O'Rourke has close to 30 solo and collaborative releases to his credit, not to mention the slew of albums he's produced by a diverse clientele including folk-rockers Smog, experimental guitar-picker and personal hero John Fahey, and plush-popsters The Sea and Cake. Lately, he's basking in the glow of Bad Timing. It's a lush and very personal effort, sort of a departure for the musical conceptualist. Heavy on undistorted, classical guitar and backed by an all-star Chicago lineup that includes the equally ubiquitous John McEntire on drums, it's a painfully swooning effort, fluctuating effortlessly between sorrow and resolution. Most of his solo releases to date have set out to answer one musical question or another. For example, his 1995 record, Terminal Pharmacy, tackled the not-so-tuneful topic of French compositional abstraction. But, he says, "Bad Timing is not driven by any conceptual or aesthetic idea. It's just a record of music, which I had never done before." Musically, O'Rourke has never been one to let grass grow under his feet. So his leaving Gastr Del Sol last summer shouldn't have come as much of a shock. "[Gastr Del Sol] had been taking up too much time and had become an everyday thing. It had become too comfortable and I'm not comfortable with that," says O'Rourke. "To me it's the only way you learn. If you're comfortable, you settle into things. I don't think you should learn to do something and then develop it. You should always be in a situation where you have to be on your toes." At the very moment he's in New York, again expanding his parameters. He's playing with Thurston Moore under the direction of composer Takehisa Kosugi in the orchestra for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's Forward & Reverse at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. With so much on his plate, he doesn't imagine he'll get to work on the covers record anytime soon, at least not until February. That's about as close to a plan as O'Rourke will commit himself to. On how he balances his myriad projects: "Oh gosh, balancing things. I don't know. I guess [I do it] just by waking up in the morning." So you'd imagine that with so many credentials, he'd have some pretty strong ideas about the right and wrong ways to make music. But the experimentalist/conceptualist is quite egalitarian on the topic. "I don't think I should define bad music. I don't believe in hierarchy and I don't believe in high art/low art," he explains. "It's just the way people want to communicate in the medium." But musical populism aside, there's one genre O'Rourke just can't stomach. "There is some music I personally hate," he concedes. "I'm not into reggae. I'll never do anything with reggae."
|
