The Daily Swarm

The AV Club:

Jim O’Rourke is a storied musician and producer who has cut something of a Zelig-like figure in indie music in the 1990s and 2000s. He came up with the prescient avant-folk group Gastr Del Sol, made numerous records full of drones and noise, and played crucial roles in such big bands as Wilco (he helped conceive Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) and Sonic Youth (he was temporarily a fifth member of the band). His studio credits, as a producer and/or mixer, include records by Stereolab, John Fahey, Joanna Newsom, Faust, Beth Orton, and many more. Alongside all that, O’Rourke has released a string of significant solo albums that flit through densely finger-picked acoustic guitar (1997’s Bad Timing), fruitful games with the forms of melody and song (1999’s Eureka), and black-comic songwriting that pairs improbably bleak lyrics with pointedly innocuous background music (2001’s Insignificance). To that string, he recently added a new record called The Visitor, a stirring album-length composition that moves through densely layered folk, would-be movie-music, and sounds suggestive of much more. O’Rourke played and recorded all the instruments on The Visitor by himself. Recently, The A.V. Club talked with O’Rourke, calling from his home in Tokyo, about learning to play trombone, recording with Pro Tools, and using music as a means for self-inquisition.