On Sunday, the New York Times ran an article about Jim O’Rourke, an underground overachiever who, in addition to recording his own solo music, has played in Sonic Youth and Gastr Del Sol, and worked in various other capacities with Wilco, Joanna Newsom, and Superchunk.

His latest project is the new solo album The Visitor, a recording that, at times, features as many as 200 tracks of instruments.

As one might imagine, an album such as this would require quite an intricate mix, which is perhaps why The Visitor will only be available on CD and vinyl—no digital download.

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Jim O’Rourke: I’m Happy, And I’m Singing, And A 1,2,3,4 (Expanded Edition)

From his collaborations with Sonic Youth, to his abstract guitar improvisations, to his seemingly bottomless catalog of drone compositions, Jim O’Rourke has made a lot of records. However, if one were to name the quintessential O’Rourke LP, it would have to be I’m Happy, I’m Singing, And A 1,2,3,4. Originally released in 2001 by the Austrian electronic label Mego, “I’m Happy” was O’Rourke’s attempt at solo laptop composition, using an array of max/msp patches to generate heavilly textured compositions in the style of Brian Eno’s Discreet Music. But every major O’Rourke calling card is here–from his preferred instruments (acoustic guitar and accordion), to influences, to the music concrete-style trickery (are those strings, or synthesizers, or both?) that he employed so effectively on earlier compositions like Tamper. But what’s most striking is O’Rourke’s use of melody.

Laptop music at the time–and especially among his peers on the Mego label–was an extremely noisy pursuit. At the time, to listen to a record by Pita, the alias of Mego founder Peter Rheberg, was like plugging a dial-up modem into a marshal stack and sticking your head in front of the speaker cone. On I’m Happy, And I’m Singing, And A 1,2,3,4, O’Rourke brought a more directly musical sensibility to laptop music–he swept out the noise, and instead, concentrated on manipulating simple and harmonious sounds.
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