JIM O’ROURKE – The Visitor

A notorious omnivorous listener, Jim O’Rourke makes us ponder at some logically riveting compositional ideas, his instantly identifiable individuality blooming from genuine (or just suspected) musical influences. Technical facility is also an essential issue in The Visitor, an album in which he handles all instruments, thus confirming the remarkable eclecticism that made him famous. The advice we’re given is “play on loudspeakers, loud”, and one immediately comprehends that this is the condition in which the principal’s most stirring harmonic wisdom can shine. The music, comprised by a single 38 minute track, is in fact improved by superior orchestral hues and unobtrusive finesse that only skilled ears will discern, such as the protracted hovering of unusually suggestive pregnant frequencies after a particular chord or superimposition. Details like these, beyond the sheer quality of the composition, are the features that alone render the CD worthy of repeated examination.

The protagonist’s acoustic guitar often appears as the nub around which lots of incidences revolve, yet it’s tremendously fascinating to hear how the Chicagoan develops atypical resonances through the adjacent layering of different instrumental complexions and pigmentations, managing to let them sound as a natural occurrence. O’Rourke’s itineraries denote a world of reflective observation, at times underscored by the secluded melancholy of a piano or by the all-American echoes of steel guitars and banjos. A magnificent interlude about 17 minutes in flows directly into a Reichian embroidery replete with interlocking patterns and arpeggios, an enticing illustration of the man’s command of a huge amount of idioms. The sense of solitude expressed by certain openings is plain touching: the mournful tranquillity of the passage starting at circa 28’ is striking, an underlying concoction of strummed strings and soft-spoken contrasts that, born in slight discordance, might lead a sensitive addressee to a state of lucid bliss.

A few Bacharach reminiscences here, a couple of Steve Tibbetts-meet-Pink Floyd bucolic gradations there; O’Rourke is always willing to show a way in, even to those who tend to associate rather than acknowledging uniqueness. These tokens are glimpses from an achingly irretrievable past, not second-hand postcards. They do not detract from, but instead enrich a record that improves its magnitude with each spin, quiet nature and total unpretentiousness winning upon a stonehearted pessimism.

Call it an unforthcoming classic.

Drag City

CHAS SMITH – Nakadai

Originally released as a vinyl LP on Arc Light in 1987, Nakadai's reissue came out in 2008 with the addition of two bonus tracks, but was received only recently in this house. As I’m writing, it’s spinning for the fourth time in 12 hours - and my heart and brain are spiraling, too. Chas Smith is among the mavericks who have managed to create a personal niche, his work with pedal steel, self-built instruments and sonic sculptures legendary. He does not saturate the market with recordings: each record symbolizes a wonderfully uncommon daydream through which one might put a finger on that part of the inner nature that suggests the correct behavior when the world proposes the exact opposite. A music of solitude, of utter awareness, a soundtrack for the struggle of the few sensitive humans remained - those we desperately look for, unsuccessfully - against daily mediocrity. Sounds that fuel the necessity of what Pauline Oliveros would define as “deep listening”.

Either via superimposed guitars or with the help of other musicians on tuned percussion (in this case Bob Fernandez, John Fitzgerald, M.B. Gordy and Theresa Knight) Smith treats the listener with majestic swells of indefinitely echoing harmonies, adjacent chords that flutter and waver in completely suspended, continuously morphing tonalities. Clouds of intangible pitches gradually extend their effect on the surrounding environment, then make a way into the most invulnerable resistances of our individual psychophysical equipment. They shift in the air and move us within, putting in touch with a hypothetically clearer reality that we still hope to reach sometimes. Once the music’s over, though, that certainty returns in the obscure realms of nonexistence, and we’re unable to recollect ourselves for a while.

Despite the total difference of the initial sources, these pieces frequently recall the discerning complexity of Roland Kayn’s breathtaking visions, bringing back that state of grief-stricken realization of something inaccessible that can just be intuited and wished for. A sort of prelude for the phase that’s going to come after life, when those who really understood – people who teach by remaining in silence, talk with a hint of the eyes and make their essence resound without the need of bombast - will be turned into another kind of energy, hopefully similar to the untainted vibrations elicited by Smith’s marvelous creations.

Cold Blue