Lee Ranaldo, Jim O'Rourke & Christophe Heemann - Bloomington, Indiana... Autumn

Our review
Customer reviews
Press release

4...according to our Brett on Thu 22 Apr, 2010.

Yeah, you know how Lee Ranaldo gets. He starts on his poetry the only way to shut him up is to start droning all over the place. He hates that shit. It makes him run away and hide in his little cave. Jim O'Rourke and Christophe Heemann were among the first people to discover this tactic which they use to perfection on this here re-working of a live date from 1994 which they like to call 'Bloomington, Indiana'. After a near-side of haunting feedback tones he tries to join back in but he's all muddled because he's scared and dead echoey because he's in his cave and there's no furniture in there. 'Autumn' on the second side is from 1991 and doesn't have Lee on it because he was cave hunting back then. It's along similar lines though - minimal, isolationist-type drones which you hear a fair bit of these days but at the time they'll have been blazing a bit of a trail I'd wager. If Dave was here he'd well have said "Proper art gallery" by now.

Part One, May 1994, Lee Ranaldo lends the voice and words of his ‘Bloomington, Indiana’ piece to Jim O’Rourke and Christoph Heemann for a text-based collaborative composition that turns into an electroacoustic exploration, making use of Ranaldo’s voice exclusively.

A critic’s remark made after a first version of this piece was premiered at a sound art festival in the Netherlands that same year: “Rock and roll burnout syndrome goes whistling down a dark and lonely street,” still appears as peculiar as the piece itself.

Part two ‘Autumn’ goes back further to the time when Heemann and O’Rourke produced several pieces for their Plastic Palace People project (of which more releases are in preparation now).

Be the first to review this record. Best reviewer each month gets £10 off their next order!