Jim O'Rourke - The Visitor

If there are more interesting albums that have come out this year, I haven't heard them. As intended, this is not available for download. The link takes you to Drag City, where you can have this delivered to your doorstep for $16 or $12 (LP/CD). AMG hasn't reviewed it, so I have excerpted another review.


O’Rourke wrote all the music, performed all of the instrumental parts, and recorded The Visitor in his home studio in Tokyo—and the finished product is a mile wide and several miles deep. Drums, bass, guitars (electric and acoustic), piano, organ, clarinet, banjo, and more steer one montage into the next, via slow transition or direct segue (important side note: according to O’Rourke, there are over 200 tracks on this record).

If your first reaction to the notion of an all-instrumental "pop" album is confusion, you have every right to be apprehensive. Prior experiments by lesser artists have produced results that usually splattered on the "dreadful" and "self-indulgent" parts of the spectrum. But O’Rourke is not a lesser artist: his awareness of minute details and the trump card known as "form" are in perfect balance, and it is because of this that The Visitor becomes more intriguing with every listen. Although it may be indexed as one continuous track, this album harbors variety in spades.

If you aren’t sold on this record yet, I would like to make a bold statement: you should buy it solely because Jim O’Rourke engineered it. The Visitor is sonically divine, a fact that should come as no surprise to fans of earlier O’Rourke recordings. Each individual instrument is allowed to breathe, and each layer provides the right support for every other one. If there must be one recent album to serve as an example of how glorious recorded instruments can be, The Visitor gets my vote.

--Jeremy Podgursky, NewMusicBox

(Jim O'Rourke - The Visitor)

Harold Budd - The Pavilion of Dreams

All Music Guide didn't rate this very highly ("The opening "Bismillahi 'Rhahmani 'Rrahim" is the musical equivalent of a bubble bath") , so I'm using a different source for the blurb. It's also written about in more depth at Ground and Sky, but that reviewer cannot form sentences.

The 1978 recording debut from reformed avant-garde composer and eventual ambient forerunner Harold Budd consists of four chamber works (written between 1972 and 1975) that use varying combinations of harp, mallet instruments, piano, saxophone, and female or male vocals. Two years before his fateful first studio collaboration with Brian Eno (who produced this album), Budd was creating hypnotic music in an acoustic mode. All of the works herein--including "Two Rooms," whose latter half is an adaptation of John Coltrane's "After the Rain"--sustain a similarly dreamy vibe. An important credo for Budd was to make music as pretty as possible as an antidote to the noisy avant-garde he had escaped from. One cannot fault him for the lovely sounds he creates here, although fans familiar with his more cinematic works might be caught off-guard. Regardless, the pleasant Pavilion of Dreams provides insight into Budd's past, and it offers the same somniferous effect as a gentle lullaby, making it perfect for late-evening listening. --Bryan Reesman

(Harold Budd - The Pavillion of Dreams)