Jim O’Rourke & Samuel Andreyev: Round 2 

Would love a regular series of you guys chatting

Don’t be surprised most people watch those in full - I don’t think anybody clicks on an O’Rourke interview by accident or without preexisting reverence for the man 🙂

I watched the first interview with Jim multiple times, from start to finish

Another start-to-finish viewer here. These are absolute gold.

The Nurse With Wound List was a huge one that led a lot of people to discover vital music pre-internet.

It's very rare to find conversations about this kind of music at this level, on RU-vid or elsewhere. Even the most subjective opinions are so well articulated!

have loved both talks....now please Round 3 to discuss The Visitor in depth :)

So amazing that there's a part 2 to this first one!!!!!!! Going to listen all the way thru again.....

I haven't clicked faster than this video! I can only imagine this will be fantastic!

thank you.

This is a giant blessing. I thought I'd never see Jim sit and talk openly like this

That Portraits GRM series is probably my favorite thing currently out there. Loved the Rafael Toral record as well, very excited to see what Jim will cook up next.

I could watch you guys talk endlessly. May there be many more rounds to come! Speaking of the 'cross-referencing' approach to discovering music that Jim talked about: most of the music I discovered in college came from listening to all of the records he worked on working out from there. And oh yes, the list of "Top Ten Minimalist Records" he once posted - on his old Hoobalaboobala website, if I recall - was my introduction to minimalism.

I discovered Jim’s music about two months ago and yesterday my Eureka vinyl arrived! His music serves as a great inspiration for me as an artist. I also love the energy around him. The comments under any video about Jim are always so positive! It really makes me happy!

Mike Oldfield Incantations I think you mean?, yes, it's his best thing

I listened to the first interview with Jim this morning without knowing there was another one, and I listened to the second one after going out for lunch. Very nicely done. I kept adding albums you guys discussed to my Tidal library, and I now have 15 albums to listen to, and some of those are just starting points for further exploration. Thanks so much!

Well, well, well. Life comes full circle. Many, many years ago I saw the Nicolas Roeg film "Bad Timing" on TV. In one scene there's a book on a bed. That book is "The Sheltering Sky". I thought, "I wonder why that's there, the director must want me to read it." So I did, and for decades it was my favourite book. And today I learn that Jim O'Rourke's first studio album is "Bad Timing".

Interview Kyle Gann next!

Eureka is one of the best albums in the music history, even John Frusciante of RHCP says it’s his all time favorite album. That French artist’s name is Eve Aboulkheir.

I got know idea who either one of these guys are but... Sure enjoyed listening!

I hope there are many more Jim O’Rourke's in this world doing a similar gig

I doubt Jim will ever read this but I can explain what I liked about Eureka when I first heard it. I was living in Michigan and djing a bunch and also listening to mostly electronic music for about a decade leading up and the record had an openness you don’t really hear in rock very often. It felt pieced together a lot like how me and my friends were piecing house, techno and other electronic styles together on our own productions. That on top of being completely heartbroken and lost in my life at the time just made it an automatic listener for me. The lyrics really validated my shitty mood and gave me something to laugh at/with. Being from the east coast and living in the Great Lakes it also really sounded like a soundtrack to my surroundings and sounded very midwestern to me. The other non fully electronic music I’d been listening to a bunch were The Sea and Cake (favorite band) Tortoise and Nick Drake and eureka just fit in there with all that stuff. Was definitely listening to Prekop’s solo stuff a bunch at that time too. Jim’s and Laeticia Sadier are the only records I’ve bought off drag city so it definitely wasn’t a label inspired purchase for me.

I'm so glad you pointed out Rafael Toral here! I had never heard of him before, but completely independently I've been exploring similar things with mini amp feedback since stumbling into it in high school (probably around 2009-10, I have some old videos about it on my channel when I still hadn't developed it much, will try to get some more updated stuff up when I can) and up til now hadn't heard of anyone else doing anything along those lines until this video. Turns out he's basically been developing and refining the craft for about as long as I've been alive and I just had no idea this whole time, lol. Currently digesting as much of his work as I can and checking out the interviews and articles he conveniently pulled together on his website, and more and more I can't help but think, "this might be my guy." So thank you thank you thank you for bringing him to my attention!

Jim: Think about the actual difficult prog bands... Me: Gentle Giant! Jim: Like Gentle Giant... Me: Fuck yeah!

I did the same thing as Jim with the list in "Freak Out", very informative! Frank guided me to Stravinsky, Varesé, Cage, Schönberg, Webern etc. The only major inspiration I didn't get from Frank is Marcel Duchamp, I got that from John Cage.

Es genial escuchar a Jim siempre, especialmente porque -como explican al inicio- no hay mucha reflexión sobre música experimental. Gracias!

« If I get the sense that I’m being entertained, I lose interest very quickly. » Good one!

Hi Samuel, I'm loving you're including more artists from the 'experimental' music worlds outside of formal composition. It is a very rich and diverse area. I would love to hear more interviews with people from this background - sound artists, free improvisers, musicologists etc. Some names that come to mind are Axel Dorner Magda Mayas, Burkhard Beins (All part of the important Echtzeitmusik movement in Berlin) David Toop, any AMM members (UK wise) or Tyshawn Sorey, Corey Smyth, Steve Lehman from the US scene. Even experimental producers like Galen Tipton or Ryoji Ikeda could pose a fascinating discussion.

Yes! Needed to hear more from you both!

Great to Hear about Rafael Toral. My favourite record of his is Violence Of Discovery And Calm Of Acceptance. funny he mentioned the Listening Party - i run one of those in the purely analog world.

Thank you thank you for this. It’s just amazing. ❤️

thank you so much for your work! it's very inspiring, and leads to a huge research - finding the composers you've mentioned and reading the books! I will definitely get back to both parts of the interview in the following months and probably years. this talk works pretty much just like that Zappa record Jim has mentioned... brilliant!

Those two interviews are a real lesson on being chill about what you do when creating music (no matter the anxiety with the work), wish those things were said more in places teaching “contemporary music” or “new music”. thanks Samuel for the discovery !

I watched all of the last one! It was fab.

would love to see a John Oswald interview

This relaxed, free ranging approach is a joy to listen to. Thank you both very much.

Excellent.. Also back to Audirvana after a bit of time with Roon. Audirvana and it's integration with my studio gear has really come a long way.

Thanks for this. Appreciate.

Oh sick. Thanks for doing this again. I appreciate all the references mentioned in the first one and stoked to listen to all the artists/albums mentioned in this one.

This is gold

!!!

Is there any list of the references on these 2 podcasts with Jim? That would a great starting point for many people to start discovering new music.

Lovely, lovely interview. And excited for more Moikai releases!

For everyone curious about checking out a wide array of experimental and new music. Check out “Music after the fall” by Tim Rutherford Johnson. It’s like a more modern Griffith book.

I agree with your take on The Velvet Underground. Those textures add to the spirit and allure of the songs/music. Texture and atmosphere seem underrated to me, especially in the "classical" world of music. Sometimes I prefer a "lo-fi" quality recording of a Bartok piano piece recorded in the 30's/40's for instance, to a modern pristine recording of the same piece. Just my two cents.

Songs from Liquid Days is the Philip Glass album with pop singers on it that he was referring to. Linda Ronstadt sings on it.

Martin Smolka!

What's the awareness of the artistry of sound capture in classical music? The 1981 Goldbergs by Gould were recorded simultaneously on tape and digital. Same performance, two different sound textures, two different listening experience. Many reference recordings in classical music get a lot of their magic because of how lo-fi the recording was. Or not necessarily lo-fi but how technology affected the capture of frequencies, altering the general color in a paradoxically positive direction for the listener. The best example I know is Furtwängler's version of Tristan. In this particular case the emphasis on mid-range frequencies created a dreamy atmosphere that fits the theme of the Opera. A more radical example is the Markevitch version of Boulanger's Pie Jesu. The sound is so blurry the music becomes something else, dream-like and scary.

Interesting stuff. Imagine saying about Arvo Part that he 'doesn't have a system" when in effect he is quite obviously an algorithmic composer: elegant (in the mathematical sense), aphoristic miniature clockwork mechanisms that spin out these long and broad inventions, but finished in this soft fluffy surface that many people, whatever their opinion of it, take to be the actual point of the piece (there's a lot of visual art equivalents to these). There's a few retro-engineered max implementions of Part's stuff knocking around ...

10cc truly are remarkable

So surprised to find out that Jim isn’t a fan of the Velvet Underground! Especially since he covered Venus in Furs on a Velvets cover album, though that was 20 years ago: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-YM506qZEnu4.htmlsi=c-oFTDx1aLAWCsJY

Kevin Ayers is not on the 2nd Soft Machine album.

I think the Mike Oldfield record he means is Incantations

Soundohm is the best internet record shop on the planet!

"Music for hot yoga on Wednesdays." 🤣

I ended up here a long time ago after watching and rewatching the video about Frownland. (And, long before that, spending years listening to John Peel.) I still don't get Captain Beefheart, and plenty of other music discussed here - I'll keep trying - but I do get all sorts of music which comes, I would say, from a similar place eg Melt-Banana, Girl Band/Gilla Band, Headbutt, The Happy Flowers :-) and a few others. It's really interesting to listen to people who take this seriously. I went to see Gilla Band a couple of weeks ago in Birmingham, and in amongst all the (controlled) noise, they were struggling with their equipment a bit and there was quite a lot of (unintentional) feedback. On the face of it they're making a racket, the equipment's making a racket, what difference does it make, but the feedback was really out of place 🙂 I'm hoping, by listening to these conversations, to find out more about why. Thank you.

Incantations is that Oldfield record. 🙂

re mainstream coverage in the olden days, in UK Laurie Anderson's O Superman got to number 2 in the pop charts!

Sam and Jim were casting around for names of artists that are working at the cutting edge but are also popular and couldn't come up with any. I would nominate Björk. Classically-trained, currently making albums that explore single acoustic instruments (there's been a violin one, a flute one and a bass clarinet one) with interesting writing for the instruments. She would be great grist for Sam's analysis mill I think.

what's that book Jim is talking about in the beginning, Michael Neuman/Newman.. i'm failing to google it

What was the new interesting album/artist Jim recommended at some point? I lost the spot. Was it Eve Aboulkheir? What was the album?

Who did he mention in the beginning? Eve?

1:34:29

Surprised you haven't heard of Polyphia before, they have become a sort of cult especially for people of the so called "gen Z" who uses mostly youtube to get to know about music. First heard of them in 2018 from the needle drop, that I use to check "what came out recently" in music genres I am not very familiar with. Lately they have really become some sort of modern guitar heroes and their new album received a sort of "memification" indispensable for reaching a certain type of mass audience. For the question about new artists in the hip hop/electronic genre who mixes accessibility and complexity of writing, I am really fond of the production of Jpeg Mafia, and going even more mainstream, the album "Igor" by Tyler the Creator has some really refined and original production choices

Who exactly are the British minimalists who Jim refers to as educated at public schools (ie privileged private schools)? He only mentions Nyman and Bryars, both of whom were grammar school boys. It seems a strange way to characterize British minimalism.