Jim O’Rourke is sitting outside his bedroom studio in a North Side apartment. Between this position on the couch, watching and rewatching countless movies that he says provide the aesthetic foundation for much of his music, and hunched over a mixing board in his bedroom, manipulating sounds for any number of recording projects, he spends 19 hours a day.
“I can’t seem to get away from it,” says O’Rourke, 28, with a slightly embarrassed chuckle. Since emerging in his teens as something of a new-music guitar prodigy, O’Rourke has been involved in about 200 recordings as a composer, performer, producer or remixer, including a new solo album, “Bad Timing” (Drag City), that is among the most instantly inviting of his career.
The disc of four long, shape-shifting instrumentals blends O’Rourke’s guitar finger-picking with electronic textures and orchestrations by drummer John McEntire, pedal-steel whiz Ken Champion and a variety of horn and string players. It’s a fine introduction to O’Rourke’s vast body of work, but it represents only a small slice of his world. This is an artist, after all, who has worked with everyone from European avant-garde giants Derek Bailey, Henry Kaiser and the legendary German art-rock ensemble Faust to more traditional singer-songwriters Edith Frost, Chris Connelly and Smog’s Bill Callahan. His own projects have veered from rock-oriented bands such as Gastr del Sol, the Red Krayola and Brise Glace to more abstract work with drones, distortion and collage techniques.
Though revered in certain European circles for his more experimental work, he’s probably best known in America for his albums with fellow musical explorer David Grubbs in Gastr del Sol. But after playing on and engineering what will be the fourth full-length Gastr release, “Camoufleur,” due out in January on Drag City, O’Rourke says he’s quitting the group. “It was taking way too much of my life,” he says. “Dave’s interest in doing this austere, measured music no longer was of interest to me. We did something with it and I don’t want to do it again.”
That said, “Camoufleur” sounds like the group’s most elaborate, densely orchestrated record yet — the kind of disc that might have pushed the group to another level of commercial success. But that’s always been a peripheral issue for O’Rourke.
“That’s probably what drew me away, the idea that there was this established Gastr `thing’ that we do,” O’Rourke says. Instead, this restless improviser has been focusing on new ways to make himself feel “uncomfortable.”
“My main interest in improvised music is to hear something that I’ve never heard before,” he says. “Not many people actually improvise, they instead fall into a common language called `improvised music.’ Improvisation means finding something genuinely new. It’s someone playing something and making someone else uncomfortable with it, and that guy saying, `Oh, yeah!’ and finding a way out of it. Sometimes it falls flat, but that’s what makes it exciting.”
In keeping with the spirit of that approach, O’Rourke has spent months at a time barely picking up his guitar and instead exploring other instruments — hurdy-gurdy, organ, synthesizer — in an effort to challenge himself. “You want to get away from the sort of automatic playing that starts to creep in when the territory becomes overly familiar — it’s like when you’re driving your car and you suddenly realize you don’t remember anything about traveling the last 10 miles,” he says. “When I do that, I just stop and start over.”
Recently he scrapped an entire album he was working on for a Belgian label because he realized midway through the project that “it was something I used to do, and it was a good example of it, but so what? I’d rather buy an album of someone else doing that rather than hear me doing it again.”
Only one thing is certain at an O’Rourke concert: He won’t play the “hits.” “People have gotten used to the idea that I’m not going to do anything that I’ve done before,” he says. “So the challenge has become how to surprise people who are expecting to be surprised.”
O’Rourke pulled it off at the recent College Music Journal seminar in New York by urgently singing a couple of hippie-era pop songs: Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air” and “Cry Me a River,” a hit for Joe Cocker. His next album will consist of pop songs that have been “poorly arranged or produced and are therefore considered really bad songs but have a kernel of something that makes them, I think, inherently good.”
Those passions suggest that O’Rourke is a heck of a lot more fun than his “serious” reputation suggests. Some of that humor is sly: His recent remix of a Sea and Cake song (which he redubbed “I took the opportunity to antique my end table”) emphasizes an outlandishly over-the-top drum fill, turning it into a commentary on arena rock from a group revered for its understatement. He’s not immune to the occasional broad gesture himself, like when he emceed a punk concert in the guise of a surly, cigarette-smoking clown.
“I’m shy, but I’m not afraid to look stupid,” he says. “I’m more interested in making people confused — that’s a better forum for thinking about things. Because if you don’t confuse people, they just go on to the next thing.”
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O’Rourke will perform Dec. 27 at the Empty Bottle on a bill with fellow Chicago iconoclasts Souled American.
