As a producer, Jim O’Rourke is responsible for fundamentally re-shaping Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (and the band itself); as a composer, his songs could accompany both sweet dreams and nightmares; as a lyricist, his turns of phrase are pretty much enviable.

Yet perhaps because of his boundary-testing nature, the Chicago experimentalist doesn’t like to outstay his welcome. Even his album art, though always amazing, is tough to digest sometimes.

The better part of a decade has passed since O’Rourke released anything solo. Granted, he did record those two Loose Fur albums with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and Glenn Kotche, and he recorded and toured with Sonic Youth, but that’s a whole different thing. This year, Drag City also re-issued some of O’Rourke’s early work—including a three-hour two-disc epic described by the label as a “double-disc drone-gasm”—but it’s just not the same. Continue reading →