Chance Meeting
Friday August 29th, 2025 with Heavy Ben
Jim O'Rourke's Happy Days and Bad Timing

Chance meeting on a happy day of a steel-string guitar and a hurdy gurdy Jim O'Rourke is a rarity: a genuine bridge between the avant-garde and the underground. From his production work (Smog, Wilco, Faust, Stereolab) to his own freewheeling excursions as a solo performer and member of outfits like Gastr del Sol and Sonic Youth, his work continues to bring the out there in here. Happy Days found O'Rourke making a new record for Revenant, which in no small part acknowledged the debt owed to that label's founder, John Fahey. Happy Days pits a lone guitar against a phalanx of hurdy-gurdies, a decided shift away from the composer's electronic-based work. A roiling hornet's next of activity that Forced Exposure called 1997's most explosive piece of music. The liner notes sum it up in a few words, "Without whom: Tony Conrad and John Fahey". For the opening few minutes O'Rourke plucks a single note over two octaves via his steel-strung guitar, before gradually beginning to embellish and form a fully fledged melodic narrative. Simultaneously, rasping drones a la Conrad violins rise up from the background, eventually taking over the recording altogether, acquiring a scathing line in overtones that propel the piece into brutal, tranced-out oblivion by the time it ascends to an increasingly cacophonous crescendo. The sustained intensity of it all drops away around four minutes prior to the end revealing O'Rourke' guitar once more, ushering in a steady, rhythmic finale that rounds off the recording much as it began. Bad Timing was released the same year. In 1997 the notion of solo acoustic guitar as a medium for expression of album-length ideas was only just emerging from hibernation. In North America, the acoustic guitar is often associated with “folk” music of a certain mood; from 1970s singer-songwriters to the ’80s emergence of new age and then onto the rise of “unplugged” music in the ’90s, the acoustic became associated with relaxation, intimacy, quiet contemplation—a sound ostensibly more closely connected to the natural world than its electric counterpart. But Fahey’s vision for acoustic guitar was something else entirely. He was among the first to fully grasp that the instrument had uniquely expressive qualities, that its possibilities as a device for melody, harmony, and rhythm were untapped, and alternate tunings gave it further flexibility other instruments couldn’t match. In Fahey’s hands, the guitar became an orchestra in miniature, and long, multi-part pieces with the thunderous sweep of a symphony could sit alongside rustic evocations of the past. Fahey’s guitar became a tool for collapsing time and space, able to incorporate the grand sweep of music history in a flurry of strummed chords, fingerpicked melodies, and raga-like repeating rhythms. Expanding Bad Timing beyond a solo guitar album allowed O’Rourke to paint on a much larger canvas. “For me both Happy Days and Bad Timing were about my myths,” O'Rourke explained. “A big part of my head is Americana. But the Americana I know comes from listening to Van Dyke Parks, John Fahey, and Charles Ives. That doesn’t exist, and I have to face the fact that it doesn't exist. I have to address that it’s nothing but a construct.” Parks’ lush arrangements and his gentle irony; Fahey’s vast scope; Ives’ clash of folk simplicity and avant-garde dissonance—these elements are all over Bad Timing, and minimalism is the final piece of the puzzle. Though it draws heavily from the music of other cultures, particularly India, minimalism as a compositional technique is closely identified with American icons, in particular the work of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and LaMonte Young. Glass, Reich, and Riley are best known for repetition — they build meaning through gradually shifting clusters of sound. Young’s music has alternated between repetition and carefully tuned and deeply physical drone. Two other composers, Phill Niblock and Tony Conrad (violin, The Theatre of Eternal Music), both of whom O’Rourke worked with, further extended Young’s drone conceptions. For this group, held tones become a form of change; from moment to moment in a drone piece, you expect shifts and development to happen, and when they don’t, you’re constantly re-discovering where you are in the now. Liner notes courtesy Pitchfork, Boomkat, SoundOhm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_O%27Rourke_(musician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Conrad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fahey_(musician) (to embiggen the show icon, right-click and choose "Open image in new tab")