Taking a quick glance through the catalogs of both Loren Connors and Jim O'Rourke, one might assume that each artist is working in radically different, if not diametrically opposed, directions. Connors has been obsessively acuminating and distilling his particular brand of good old American blues to the tune of 50 releases over the course of roughly 30 years. Much of Connors' output sounds like extraterrestrial-inspired folk meditation music unearthed from layers of mud in the Mississippi Delta -- a constitutional re-imagining of the American folk heritage à la Charalambides or John Fahey. Fahey is perhaps an appropriate touchstone here, as O'Rourke has repeatedly cited Fahey as an influence on his own music (he also produced Fahey's 1997 album, Womblife). O'Rourke has been much more promiscuous and diverse -- though it seems a bit unfair to use this term in relation to Connors (whose MO is less about variety than it is about distillation) -- with his work, releasing albums varying from noise to jazz to laptop to musique-concrete to rock. His list of collaborators and those who have taken advantage of his production abilities is absurdly long, but a highlight reel would have to include Merzbow, Sonic Youth, Fennesz, Nurse With Wound, Thurston Moore, Joanna Newsom, and Wilco (O'Rourke actually won a Grammy for Wilco's A Ghost Is Born).
Out of the union of these two seemingly dissimilar philosophies is born this collection of three lengthy performances recorded obscurely at “various places in Europe, 1997.” The three meandering pieces (which, with names like “Maybe Paris” and “Or Possibly Koln,” are as ambiguously titled as the description of where they were recorded) are exemplary of almost everything that we look for in any good collaboration. Both members of the duo, without openly sacrificing or dumbing down their own personal styles, open themselves up to the other, allowing for some beautiful cross-pollination of sound. The tracks ebb and flow naturally between rumbling, fuzzy bits and the sort of delicate and crystalline formations for which Connors is famous.
“Maybe Paris” opens with a short period of the aforementioned gunky fuzz, moving quickly into territory clearly mapped-out by Connors. I would have loved to have been present at this particular recording, wherever in Europe it was, simply for the strange out-of-place-ness I imagine Connors' irregular conjurations of classical Americana might have had in such a context. Fortunately (or unfortunately), it doesn't translate here, and we have a simple, beautiful breeze on the cheek of a guitar piece. On “Or Possibly Koln,” the duo succumbs to the temptation that must come when any two guitar virtuosos plug-in together: to let some shit rip. Up until the very end, the track is decidedly sludgy and wouldn't sound foreign in the slightest were it found on a Southern Lord release. One guitar provides heavy feedback and background distortion, while the other gives birth to a riff that could have been pulled straight from Dopethrone. The final track, “Most Definitely Not Koln,” is the most amorphous of the bunch. Guitars slide into pools of screeching feedback, slowly claw their ways up to decipherability again, only to be kicked back into the mire before fading utterly into a near-silence punctuated by lonely guitar tones until the final cutoff.
The conversation that Connors and O'Rourke have entered themselves into here is enormously and obviously a fruitful one and, having been recorded in 1997, I can't help but wonder why it wasn't released earlier. The running theme here is that teamwork works. The two guitar lines are always distinct and occasionally operating on somewhat different wavelengths, but never do we get the feeling that they have drifted out of spiritshot, if you will, of each other. Without an explicit focus, the two guitarists feel as if they are both of similar mind as to what it is that they are up to -- sometimes precisely in sync, sometimes separate, but always moving with reference to one another. Despite what their discographies might signify, Connors and O'Rourke seem to be in a very similar creative mindset here.
1. Maybe Paris
2. Or Possibly Koln
3. Most Definitely Not Koln
More about: Loren Connors & Jim O'Rourke
