Jim O'Rourke - Old News #5

This is a compilation of old unreleased material by the little man. It's all in the analogue synth, tape manipulations and found sound category. It seems a long, long time since O'Rourke made pop records or even played a guitar and this is as far away from his major league albums as it's possible to get. The record contains 'Pedal and Pedal', a live set at Tokyo's Super Deluxe, and 'Detain The Man To Whom' recorded in 1992. Both are strangely affecting squeaks and squawks as O'Rourke wrestles with a bank of old school equipment. Record two delivers the genuine weirdness of studio session 'Its Not His Room Anymore', backed with the ripping 'Mother and Who', which is an alternate version of what would become O'Rourke's live set at the 2003 All Tomorrows Parties Festival in UK. It's all pretty scary really and I can barely find anything within the grooves that I'd want to listen to again but maybe that's not the point. It's more about the cut and paste nature of the modular synth compositions that will be of interest to fans of these kind of experiments. A lot of this will have been done on the fly and never to be repeated. The production of the music, rather than what it ends up sounding like is the crux of the work but believe me it's absolutely no fun to listen to.