Jim O'Rourke is about to release his first album of new material in 8 years & I for one am pretty excited. Well, as excited as one gets about that type of thing nowadays anyway. Though he's come to prominence in the meantime via his short term collaborations with Sonic Youth & Wilco, plus a couple of outstanding & atypically accessible song-orientated LPs on Drag City, his seminal recordings (many only ever released on cassette) remain stubbornly out of print. I recently found a couple c/o 433 blog: 1989's Some Kind Of Pagan (for solo guitar) & 1991 Secure On The Loose Rim (keyboard-based) from 1991, neither of which I'd heard before. Both were originally distributed by cassette godfather Al Margolis' defunct Sound Of Pig label & predictably command a small fortune nowadays. Their sustained obscurity possibly suggests that O'Rourke would prefer we not dwell on the past (his past specifically) but for anybody with even a transient interest in his expansive oeuvre they're nothing less than a mandatory listen. Afterall, any artist who's as comfortable colluding with Flying Saucer Attack as John Fahey, or happy staging an exhibition based entirely around photographs of Japanese women getting stuck in subway doors (citation required!), is surely worth the once-over? He was also "music consultant" on Richard Linklater's School Of Rock but don't let that discourage you. Check out Seth Tisue's peerless O'Rourke site for authoritative goss, etc.
Pagan / Rim
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