Jim O'Rourke: The Visitor

Label: Drag City

The greatest musicians are those that are not easily classified. As a solo artist, collaborator and producer, Jim O’Rourke has displayed an uncanny ability to create music that is at once familiar and exotic. On The Visitor, a nearly 40-minute instrumental composition, O’Rourke uses a variety of strings, woodwinds, percussion and some electric instruments to create a devastatingly melancholic atmosphere. Perhaps drawing from O’Rourke’s experience as an American living abroad, The Visitor invokes a spirit of total freedom familiar to anyone who has wandered from the front-porch into the great unknown of the outside world. As with much of his previous non-experimental work, The Visitor contains elements of folk, pop, jazz and a slew of other musical styles boiled down to their bare essence and presented in O’Rourke’s singular musical voice, a welcome sound in ’09. (Jeff)