TS07 - Jim O'Rourke "Despite the Water Supply"
Jim O'Rourke's "Despite the Water Supply" is out now and available from the TouchShop here. It is the seventh in the series of Touch Sevens - 7" vinyl only, with previous offerings from Fennesz, Chris Watson, Oren Ambarchi, Mika Vainio and others.
Over the last 20 years, besides his own music, Jim O'Rourke has worked with the Merce Cunningham Dance company, Takehisa Kosugi, Derek Bailey, and Tony Conrad amongst many others. He has produced albums for Beth Orton, Stereolab, John Fahey, Brigitte Fontaine, Faust, and Wilco and more. Between 1999 and 2005 he was a memeber of Sonic Youth. He has also scored films for directors Werner Herzog, Olivier Assayass, Shinji Aoyama, and Koji Wakamatsu and more. O'Rourke's own films were part of the 2004 and 2006 Whitney Bienniale and the 2005 Rotterdam Film Festival. He currently lives in Tokyo.
Reviews
Boomkat:
The seventh in Touch's impeccable 7" singles series, 'Despite The Water Supply' finds avant-garde icon Jim O'Rourke making some of the very finest drone music of his life. You can hear shades of that early, academic work in here - the organ-like sustain is clearly inherited from his late '80s and early '90s recordings, (most recently exemplified by his fantastic 'Long Night' reissue) but far from the static meditations that characterised those early emissions, these pieces are incredibly developed and intricately detailed, barely even hinting at structure and yet somehow sounding composed and resolved. Perhaps it's partially due to the short-form nature of the 7" but you feel there's an awful lot of activity packed into these two sides. Even those of you not ordinarily favourably disposed towards the genre might just be blown away by this stuff - it's quite some antidote to anyone under the impression that drone music is all about holding a note down on a synthesizer. Awesome.
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