David Keenan:

November 2001

"Of course, by the time I hit high school I was a minimalism freak," Jim O'Rourke deadpans. "A total freak. Seriously, it was a really heavy deal. I was insane. Discreet Music had just blown the whole thing open. I knew Brian Eno from Roxy Music and when I picked up that record his liner notes just put a whole lot of things in perspective. That and Michael Nyman's Experimental Music book were huge for me. It was like I finally understood the process, why these people were doing these things, just the aesthetic right in front of you in clear language. I was a Steve Reich freak too. My friend and I would go to the school orchestra room that was next door in the Catholic girls' school and just sit at the two pianos and do this phase thing for an hour." He summons a guttural drilling noise from his throat and starts to drum the air with his hands. "The teacher would just let us do it. We though he was into it, but it turns out he only let us do it because it kept all the girls away."

All this at an age when many of us were still feeling pretty pleased to have mastered full bladder control. But this is also the guy who claims he went from Paul McCartney's first solo album (purchased at the age of six) to Derek Bailey's Lot 74 by a process of "creative cross-referencing" at his local library before he'd even got to high school. This early mis-education, this obsessive attempt to join disparate dots across the face of the map, has defined O'Rourke's subsequent musical career of building, burning and reconstructing bridges between such previously exclusive genres as free improvisation, tape music, glitch electronica, acoustic folk and all-out rifferama. Between his solo work, his producing and engineering jobs, and playing in such diverse groups as Gastr Del Sol, Company, The Red Krayola, Illusion Of Safety, Fenn O'Berg and most recently, Sonic Youth, O'Rourke has plotted one of the most endearingly confusing routes across the face of modern music. Indeed, the release of Insignificance (Drag City in the US and Domino here), and I'm Happy, And I'm Singing, And A 1, 2, 3, 4 (Mego), beautifully illustrate the twin poles of his career. While I'm Happy... sees O'Rourke drawing extended circular patterns from nothing but a Powerbook, Insignificance works in almost hilarious contrast: a Southern fried rock album that reverberates with the redneck rebel rousing of the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd or Danny Whitten-era Crazy Horse.

"Everybody keeps saying it sounds so Southern," O'Rourke burst out, from the decidedly un-ranchlike surrounding of an East London townhouse where we meet during his UK promotional visit. "I didn't intend that, but I guess it's a part of it. I mean I've never really listened to Skynyrd but I guess you can't avoid them. The first song, "All Downhill From Here", was actually written on acoustic guitar, but when I finally recorded it I had been playing electric for a year, I'd been on tour and that's all I was playing so I think that's a real factor. Playing the songs acoustically implies playing them a certain way and with certain arrangements. I purposefully stayed away from that. This is actually the second version of the record. I made a first attempt but when I heard it back I just thought, ugh, this is crap. Just like Eureka 2.5 or something. It was much more pop and super-arranged and I didn't want to do that I just trashed it all.

"The current version was written, recorded and mixed in three weeks, I did it really quick. I was like, can't I just sit down and write songs, learn 'em and play 'em as a band? I didn't want to make another 'built in the studio' record. It's not like I never will again - just not now. It was also a question of practicalities. I don't really live anywhere so I wanted to see if I could just hit it and do it. It's just about songwriting, nothing more."

Still, Insignificance sounds pretty coherent after records such as 1997's Bad Timing (the first of an intermittent series titled after Nicolas Roeg's movies), Happy Days, 99's Eureka and its sister EP Halfway To A Threeway, all of which saw O'Rourke re-investigating American roots music under the benign spell of mavericks like the late guitarist John Fahey, modern minimalist Tony Conrad and Americana composer Charles Ives. O'Rourke's music similarly speaks of epic American space, of accumulative power, looming like the ever-approaching horizon. It often feels continental in scope, as though dictated by the contours of the landmass and the huge arcing skies.

"Oh yeah, my music would have to reflect that," O'Rourke agrees. "After all, I am an American, but the particular thing with me is that I've always been slightly outside of America looking in. Both my parents were Irish, so I didn't have an 'American' house when I was growing up. I would buy The Dandy and The Beano. We'd go to the Irish shop on Sunday after Mass and I didn't get Superman comics, I got Dennis The Menace. It wasn't a super-heavy UK house but I knew a lot more about UK culture than other kids at school. There were America things too, but it was very like an English script with an American set."

Growing up in Chicago, near O'Hare Airport, in the 70s, he encountered Fahey's music early on. "A lot of what's important to me in Fahey's music is the space," he asserts. "The resonance. What he was playing had as much to do with the sound as the rhythm and the notes. Someone like Leo Kottke, well, it's musician music. No insult, but as I got older I got less interested in being a musician. When I was a kid I really got into Zappa and it took me a while to realise what was actually wrong with him. I worked out that I'm not into stuff that's about musicianship. I'm interested in all of it and Fahey is about all of it. It's not good versus bad; it's just not for me."

Bad Timing marked a turning point for O'Rourke. For the first time he seemed to be shaking the conceptual shackles that had bound him to experimental projects like Brise-Glace and Gastr Del Sol, both of which were blatant exercises in genre. Around about the same time O'Rourke had become a personal friend of John Fahey, and for a shile it was almost as if they had morphed into each other. Suddenly O'Rourke was picking some gorgeously buzzing acoustic guitar while Fahey himself was busy slicing swathes of proto-Industrial noise from his electric six-string - most convincingly on Womblife, which O'Rourke produced. Or so it seemed.

"Well, Bad Timing actually happened before I knew Fahey," O'Rourke points out. I was doing a tour with Cindy Dall and the guy who was booking the tour wanted me to do a set, and so I wrote all that stuff then. I actually started all that fingerpicking stuff after hearing "Horizons" by Genesis; it's on Foxtrot, this classical guitar piece. That's where I learned to fingerpick from, more from Genesis than Fahey. I was playing that way for two years in Chicago. I would do a lot of guitar stuff around town, complete phases that I'd never end up documenting. Also, I'd already recorded Fahey's "Dry bones In The Valley" on Gastr Del Sol's Upgrade & Afterlife before I even met him, and Tony Conrad had played on it. I fact I sent Fahey a tape of it."

He adopts a mock Fahey whine. "He was like, 'Oh, it's better than mine!' Yeah, whatever. He was very nice about it. Then we did some shows in California and it went from there. He certainly had a big impact on me but not as big as it's been blown up to.

"The thing I find funny with kids in the States is that with the Internet it's so easy to find information. You get these 20 year old kids bitching, 'Oh, there's O'Rourke with his Fahey thin'. I just feel like screaming! You didn't even know who Fahey was two years ago, asshole! There's so much of that, I'm so tired of it. Kids in the States hate me, they turn on you so fast. It's frustrating. Still, Fahey's music was important to me, like Tony Conrad or Loren MazzaCane, there was something about America there. Charles Ives even more so. He was huge with me. I was lucky to get into him early on, when I was eight or nine. My library's classical section was fucking amazing. The first thing I heard by him was The Unanswered Question, I'd just come from Beethoven's Ninth and it fucking blew my mind! His Central Park In The Dark is such a fundamental part of my musical personality, it's so ingrained I don't even know it anymore." You can hear echoes of Ive's brass bands, which he would record to give the feeling of a parade passing in and out of earshot, in the way O'Rourke staggers the instrumentation on Bad Timing, with brass parts marching exuberantly into view from offscreen. "I remember the trumpet player at the time was like, 'This is stupid!' " O'Rourke laughs. "I was like, 'I know'. What's funny is this was a guy who was into Henry Cow and Todd Rundgren, who positively prided himself on his wacky credentials, yet to him I was just too stupid."

Jim O'Rourke can often come across as willfully wayward. His whole career has curved ass-backwards, moving from his early tape and tabletop guitar experiments through songwriting and joining a rock group. "The career that you see is just what I've decided to make public," he explains. "from an early age I was always playing the guitar, I just never thought I had anything to say as me with that stuff. I think one of the biggest turning points was doing the Brise-Glace record, which has kinda got forgotten because you can't even get it anymore."

Alongside O'Rourke, the short-lived Brise-Glace featured bassist Darin Gray (who has enjoyed a higher profile of late, after some great duo records with guitarist Loren MazzaCane), drummer Thymme Jones, and guitarist Dylan Posa, plus guest players like Henry Kaiser and O'Rourke's Gastr Del Sol partner David Grubbs. Their 1994 album Whne In Vanitas (engineered by Steve Albini for Skin Graft) was a collection of freely drifting instrumentals tied up with some neat conceptual baggage. "I was afraid," O'Rourke confesses. "I still didn't think I had anything to say that was worthwhile enough to bother people with. So the way I approached the Brise-Glace record was that it was a tape piece, but instead of car doors slamming I decided to put these four people together, just to see how they worked and almost make a documentary about that, like a tape piece. It was like something I could hide behind a bit, a concept to divert attention from me. I still didn't feel comfortable with having a band, but I did feel comfortable with presenting a band that wasn't a band."

Brise-Glace was originally intended as a songwriting vehicle for O'Rourke and David Grubbs, but once it became apparent that Grubbs wasn't right for it, the duo formed Gastr Del Sol. Gastr were a challenging proposition, especially in their earliest incarnation. Primarily interested in using context to provoke differing reactions, O'Rourke treated Gastr as a Trojan horse, almost, smuggling uncomfortably angular avant shapes into an indie rock record. "Still I think I discovered my confidence during Gastr," he nods. "But I wasn't really allowed to expand on it. It took a while for me to decide to get out of that situation. I knew I wanted out because it was getting very restricting and condescending, but I was always a very timid person, especially back then. I just couldn't do it. It was a weird mindfuck situation and finally it just exploded and I was like, the hell with all this. I'm just gonna do it. That's what Eureka was all about, just being fed up hiding behind something. I started to feel OK enough to do it on my own. I mean, at the end of Gastr I was doing it on my own. I don't mean Grubbs wasn't contributing, but it was just really divide by that point. It also became frustrating playing in things like The Red Krayola, where you'd work your ass off and then wonder, why? It's like: I should just be doing this by myself, why am I waiting to do it with other people?"

He was also growing tired of a certain style of improvising. "The whole Gastr thing, that way of guitar playing, you know - whoosh, ping, ding - that was how I came out of the Derek Bailey thing because I liked referencing harmony a lot. To me dissonance was most interesting when it was battling with harmony. Also, I didn't like the lifestyle of improvising. there's a whole lifestyle there and I simply wasn't interested. I didn't like listening to a constant stream of bitching and moaning and politics. I hate being involved in it. I had real idealistic ideas about improv. I'm sure this sort of stuff goes on everywhere, but when someone is a vicious careerist in rock music it's not really that surprising. I grew up with this ideal image of improvisors so it was a little shocking to me. I never thought of it as a way of making money... but, uh, I'm not going to get in trouble over this again."

He trails off, remembering the storm that blew up over his comments about European improvisors in an interview in the The Wire. It was just a tale of being 20 years old and going over to Europe and realising that the world of improv in Europe was so different than in America," he protests. "I mean John Zorn wasn't playing moneyed gigs in the States then, there's never been a culture of that in the States, so I didn't believe you should make money from it because I didn't come from that culture. I though you got a cup of coffee and maybe $20. It's always been like that. There's more support now than ever but even so, it's something you do at the coffee shop or if you're lucky you do it at Tonic. That's bigtime for an improv gig."

O'Rourke's roots reach deep into the UK's Improv scene. He had been corresponding with Derek Bailey from the age of 17, and with his Irish parents regularly crossing the Atlantic, he laid plans to take the trip over to London and head down to Bailey's East London Incus HQ. On his first visit, the young O'Rourke blew most of his savings on rare Stockhausen vinyl at Harlod Moore's in Soho before making the journey out to Bailey's house. "I went to Derek's to buy as much Incus stuff as I could," O'Rourke grins. "He had me over and he just blew me away. I always remember that his refrigerator was broken, it was buzzing away and Derek wanted to see if I could fix it. But I was like, oh no, I like the buzz! I bought as much stuff from him as I could afford. He was nice and when he was coming to Chicago he would write me and tell me he was coming over." They began playing together, with O'Rourke on tabletop guitar. Two years later, Bailey invited O'Rourke - then aged 20 - to play in the Company ensemble. He's maintained the connection to this day: Last year Incus released Xylophonen Virtuosen, O'Rourke's album with free saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. At the same time he was in touch with AMM's Eddie Prevost, with whom he went on to make Third Straight Made Public (1994).

Parallel to all of this activity, O'Rourke has been forging an alternative route through the Xeroxed world of the post-Industrial noise tape underground. "Oh yeah!" he shouts, punching the air. "That scene was my whole world for many years. There was so much good stuff happening back then and not many people are even aware of it, it's been so under-documented but it was huge. I started out on that scene, putting out some cassettes, mostly prepared guitar stuff and tape music. I also had a group, which I'll never tell you the name of. It was terrible. This was at the end of high school: 17, 18 onwards. 1985 or 86. A lot of stuff came out of that. It''s how I first got to know of Masami Akita's Merzbow stuff. I couldn't get a copy of his first LP, Material Action 2, when it came out but I picked up all his tapes on ZSF. We were all furiously writing back and forth, getting letters from people like Controlled Bleeding, Illusion Of Safety and KK Null."

Japanese guitarist and vocalist Kazuyuki K Null was particularly involved with O'Rourke. Besides Null's resolutely stoopid role in comicbook power trio Zeni Geva, he was a key early collaborator with Merzbow, with whom he released many cassettes and LPs of genuinely stirring beauty. O'Rourke cut some sides with Null too, notably New Kind Of Water on Charnel House. He even expanded Brise-Glace to take in Null's guitar and vocals, renaming the group Yona-Kit. Their self-titled CD, now deleted, was a thoroughly entertaining disaster. "Yon-Kit was a weird one-off," O'Rourke blushes, rolling his eyes. "It started off as a cassette thing where he wanted to do a Prog rock group and we though it sounded cool; Null said he wanted it to be very different from Zeni Geva. Then he sent us a tape and it was just these riffs as usual! He never said he was actually gonna sing on it and here he was, screaming stuff like "Raping an angel!" and we were like, uh-oh, I don't like being on a record where you're being kind of a moron about stuff like rape. He thought it was really shocking. Maybe if you haven't left the house for 30 years. Those songs are actually fucking bizarre though, it sounds cohesive because there are all these driving rhythms, but it's weird if you listen to it. Still, it's not a great recording. Steve Albini is a beautiful engineer but i was scared of him at the time so I didn't mix it, but I should have.

"The whole tape scene came along at just the right time for me." he continues. "I was starting to get suspicious of avant garde music and suddenly I found all these people doing this other stuff. At first I was like, this is the same thing only they're not uptight! But eventually the problem I developed was that once these guys get the sound they're after, they're satisfied with it. I always felt that once you've got the sound you should do stuff with it. That's how I started to lose interest. My aesthetic at the time was coming through in my prepared guitar stuff. I was obsessed with never using a sound that sounded like a guitar., with never using anything that betrayed my source. Years down the road I finally heard Kevin Drumm and I was like, OK, he did it, I can stop now."

Via his connections with AMM, O'Rourke also hooked up with reclusive experimental musician David Jackman and started contributing to Organum. Jackman's elemental Improv orchestra. "When I arrived back in Britain I had this piece I'd been working on as part of a school project," O'Rourke recalls. "Jackman heard it and wanted to put it out as a 12" single on Christoph Heemann's Dom label. That never happened but then David started asking me to do stuff with Organum. It got to the point where he wanted me to mix them and then to the point that he'd have the idea and want me to execute it. He just trusted me to do it. I may be on one or two of the CDs and a whole handful of the vinyl, I can never remember what I'm on."

O'Rourke has become so ubiquitous that he's constantly surprised to hear himself turning up on record he had no idea he contributed to: everything from Bjorks Post, courtesy of a sampled loop that featured him and Robin Rimbaud, through Nurse With Wound's An Awkward Pause, where he plays accodion on a tape manipulated by Christoph Heemann. He crops up again with Heemann on Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa's two most recent CDs, and on the 'supergroup' Mimir alongside Andreas Martin and Edward Ka-Spel. It was Heemann who introduced him to Cologne's nascent A-Musik scene.

"Christoph knew [A-Musik's] Frank Dommert because HNAS had done a split single with him, and Dommert put out my first full LP, The Ground Below Our Heads, in 91 on his Entenpfuhl label. A-Musik was just starting at that point, and I was up there all the time. It was a very heavy time. We'd all get together and sit up all night spinning Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba record [a cult Portuguese proto-electronica record, since reissued on O'Rourke's Moikai label], Lard Free, Agitation Free. At this point there was a lot of interesting electronics stuff happening, I met Christian Fennesz in 1990, at a festival in Vienna where I was playing with Illusion Of Safety, and at that point he'd just stopped playing rock music and Mego label had just started up. Pita, Peter Rehberg, came up to me and gave me all the records that had come out on Mego, but it took me a shile to get to listen to them. I think I might have go Instrument, Fennesz's first record. The guy who ran the festival asked if Pita and Christian and I would play in the bar afterwards, and I was amazed when I saw the stuff they were using. I didn't know that Powerbooks were strong enough to run all this music software. Most people were just using sequencers and stuff but I was amazed at this. Pita had such great software. I knew I had to get a Powerbook but it took me quite a while to save up for one."

In the mantime, Fennesz, Pita and O'Rourke struck up an inspirational working relationship and hit the road, eventually releasing the results as The Magic Sound Of Fenn O'Berg, a record that O'Rourke describes as sounding like "falling down the stairs". "For the first tour I was playing a pretty cheap computer, so al I could run were sound effects." he says. "You can open up sound files and play them and that's all, basically. I had windows open and all I could do was start, stop and play, but I was like, OK, this is all I have, let's see if I can actually work with it. Christian was the hotshot because he had the Powerbook 1400. I love playing with those guys, it's like a vacation where you get to hang out with friends and make a bunch of racket. In the last year or so it's got especially great, Improv-wise. It's different. While it is improvised and we're definitely listening to each other, the way we're relating is not the way you would relate if you had traditional instruments. The recent shows have been killer and the next album is definitely the best yet."

Yet O'Rourke doesn't see the Powerbook's imputed 'democratisation of music making' as inherently good news. Indeed, the ever-increasing proliferation of faceless soundalike glitch makes him despair. "I've stopped doing stuff with the Powerbook for now," he maintains. "Once I had selected tracks for the [Mego] record, even though none of it was new, I was like, OK, done with that, now I need to find a different approach. Powerbook shows were cool early on but the problem is it's so easy. It's easy to make it sound like all the other stuff, and you can just burn your own CD and get it released within a month. A lot of people aren't waiting to 'find themselves' in it. I mean you can tell when it's a Pita thing or a Bernhard Gunter thing, but you've got this glut of stuff with people just doing variants on them. It creates this environment for people who are just getting into it where they can't tell the difference. People say it all sounds the same and that's because a lot of it does. They may not know that there are people doing really great stuff in there, but it's understandable when people who are new to it start to wade through it and just go, 'Oh, forget it', instead of saying, 'There's a lot of crap out there but there's also some really interesting stuff'. I got like that with noise: like, enough! That's the problem when there's this glut, when it's so easy. It also means that people don't develop the music enough and I'm really selfconscious about that. I sit on things for so long, I want to make sure it's worthwhile. I'll sit on it for years. I don't think the [Mego] record sounds like all of that stuff. I wanted to make sure it was what I wanted to do with a computer."

He needn't have worried. The fantastically named I'm Happy, And I'm Singing, And A 1, 2, 3, 4 sounds quite unlike anything coming from O'Rourke's Powerbook peers. He handles his source material with a real musical sense, building evocative structures from overlapping circles of snatched samples. The disc is made up of three live performances. The first, taken from a performance at New York's Tonic, grows from a brief four second recording of O'Rourke playing the accordion into a multi-layered snowball of buzz that expands on his recent drone work with the minimalist composer Phill Niblock (O'Rourke's hurdy-gurdy plaing was sampled by Niblock on his recent Touch CD, Touch Works). But it's the final, 21 minute track that really stands out: an extended melancholy string work that brings to mind such bizarre associations as the Fantasia Suites of 17th century English composer William Lawes. "I used a short snippet of a string quartet for that piece," O'Rourke explains. "It ties into stuff that we had to write at school. I was really into taking a piece of music and multiplying th eviolin part by , the viola by three, the rhythm by two and juust keeping repeating it. They wouldn't ever superimpose, and if you picked good original source material you knew what you would get. That piece was almost like that. I'd written a program to do exactly that, so you have all these elements stretching, and the live component was transforming the sounds and moving them into each other.

"I have to admit, though, that I got to the point where I didn't want to do the Mego record at all because I knew people would say, 'Oh, O'Rourke's jumping on the Powerbook bandwagon'. I know that stuff shouldn't bother me but it does. I mean you could write on the front of the record that this material is five years old and people still wouldn't notice it. It's not important but it is really frustrating. Everyone is getting dumber and dumber. Like when people say to me, 'Oh, you make so many records', and I'll say that I haven't put out a record in two years, and they'll be like, 'What about that new Smog record?' I engineered it; it's not my record! For some reason, with all this massive information that's being thrown about, people can't distinguish what's what any more."

Yet there's no doubt that O'Rourke's strong musical personality ensures he leaves his fingerprint on every production he works on, from Faust's ill-fated Rien LP to albums by Stereolab and Melt Banana. "But it's not mine," he protests. "Hopefully I do a good job. Of course you leave a fingerprint. Everyone has certain mics they use, but I do it in service of the record. If [Smog's] Bill Callahan didn't want something, I wouldn't push it. I don't like imposing, although there have been situations where I've got so excited I've been like, 'We gotta do it!' But anyone who knows me, and I pretty much only work with people who know me, knows what I'm like when I get overexcited. You don't take it too seriously." I ask him what records have been the most rewarding to work on and he comes back without pause. "The Smog records were definitely the most rewarding for me. Bill Callahan is just great, just to sit him in front of a mic and hear him sing th estuff absolutely perfectly first time. The thing about those two records is that Knock, Knock [1999] and Red Apple Falls [1997] sound distinctly different to me from any other Smog records. I mean, I think Bill is strong enough as a singer and performer that if they just stuck a mic in front of him and released the results, I'd go buy it, but I happened to be really luck in that I worked on two records where he wanted to work with the studio more, with a bit more of an expansive sound. It was an honour and a pleasure."

Despite being homeless at the moment, O'Rourke is theoretically based in New York, mostly crashing with his Sonic Youth colleagues Kim and Thurston. Positively balking at the idea of going back to Chicago, he intends to get a place in NYC as soon as he can. "If I never had to go back to Chicago again I'd be happy," he spits. "I hate it there. It's so boring, the city closes at 10pm and I think it's dead musically. You tell me what's been good recently?" I toss him Rob Mazurek's Chicago Underground projects. "Oh yeah, I was about to say Rob Mazurek's stuff, but what else? Kevin Drumm, Bobby Conn... I have a lot of respect for Ken Vandermark. He's a really good guy but it's all overblown, what's happening in Chicago. I mean, who there knows about fold music? Nobody. For a city that's supposedly the top Improv and electronic music centre in the States, it all just seems so half-assed. Not to be mean, but people in Chicago, the musicians, most of them aren't even music fans. They all listen to the same five records; it's like some club where they rotate the same discs. I can't relate to musicians who don't like music. People I know in New York know all the stuff that people in Chicago know, but they also know, like, the whole English folk thing, from the 60s to now. There's an enthusiasm. If you grow up in Chicago you get pummelled with this myth that New Yorkers are mean and cruel, but I don't find that at all - and I've been living there long enough to know. I can go out on the street at two in the morning and it's alive, I feel alive there. In Chicago I feel like I just want to hang myself, there's nothing going on, no energy there. I call it the Chicago Disease: people like to sit around bars and bitch. In New York they just don't have time for that."

Another reason for O'Rourke to stay in New York is his newly acquired status as a member of Sonic Youth. He still can't quite believe it himself. "They won't let me go!" he bursts. "I'm still in this mindset where I'm like, 'Am I supposed to turn up today?' They always say I'm a member, but I don't say it. They seem to like having me around, and I like working with them and that's as far as I consider it. It all started when Thurston and I wer doing something with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and that's how [the recording for] SYR3 happened: we had to swing past the studio and Lee was like, 'Let's jam!' - he's Mr. Enthusiasm."

Sonic Youth's tribute to the New Music vanguard, Goodbye 20th Century (SYR4), came together at the suggestion of San Francisco percussionist William Winant, a childhood friend of Kim Gordon's. Given the modernist repertoire they were about to tackle, O'Rourke's background in avant garde theory and practice made him the perfect player to round off the team. "The reaction to the Goodby 20th Century live show was terrible," O'Rourke remembers. "I wanted to kill people. After the London show I promised myself I'd never play there again. Fuck them. These people don't really follow what Sonic Youth are doing and they don't even read the ticket. They were all shouting stuff like 'You used to be my favourite band and now you're shite!' All asking for "Kool Thing". They believed in Sonic Youth so many times before, yet they won't believe in them for this. I remember a caption in a review that just said 'Goodbye 20th Century, Goodbye Talent'. We pinned it up on the wall of the studio.

"I mean, in many ways it's actually very awkward to fit into the group," O'Rourke continues. "I'm sure to a lot of people it looks like I sneaked in, like I was thinking it was a great opportunity, but they really had to work for a long time to convince me to do it. they really had to push me. It was very challenging at first and it took me a few weeks to feel my way in. Thurston was really excited about me playing synth because he's a big Roxy Music fan, and he was like, 'More synth, more synth!' I was like, 'The more synth i play, the stupider it's gonna be'. They were excited about having this new sound - it was the [type of] synth Eno used in Roxy Music. The real challenge was when we started writing, because it's the first time I'd worked in a truly democratic group. They all approach writing completely differently to me, so I had to think, 'Right, Lee likes to do this and this is how I interpret that'. I like being in a situation that's new. The sound is a little different. Since [1994's] Experimental Jet Set, the songs have been more like interlocking parts rather than verse/chorus; more like a continually fluctuating stream, but the new songs have more definite sections to them. I've really enjoyed playing as a group, but we'd only just started on the new album when the planes hit the World Trade Center."

The September 11 attack on the World Trade Center obviously affected O'Rourke a great deal. He as sleeping in Sonic Youth's studio, just adjacent to Ground Zero, when the first impact hit. As soon as I bring it up I regret it: his mood visibly changes and he starts to speak in a slow monotone drawl. The details are upsettingly grim. "I was luck," he sighs. "I happened to be outside at the safer moments so I didn't get caught by the massive blast, but it was terrible and I saw a lot of stuff I wish I hadn't seen. I heard the first impact and I was outside for the second one, all you have to do is go outside to the corner to see the towers. The I was back inside and there was like an earthquake, which was the building falling. But I didn't know that's what it was, I thought we were being bombed, everything was just turning white. One of the plane engines landed about 50 yards from me, right at the corner of Church and Murray. We were finally alowed into the building just this past Sunday, because we were doing a benefit show with tom Verlaine. We were allowed to go in and get the instruments."

"I have to admit that I'm still at the stage of thinking it's all pointless," O'Rourke confesses. "I haven't done anything since then, the only thing I've done is play the benefit. It always seemed trivial but not as much as it does now. I don't think art is going to become more important after this. Maybe it helps some people because after the benefit a lot of people said they felt better, no necessarily because of what was played but because it was a large group of people who were worried in the same way, you know, because you're on the streets and people are still talking about fucking sports. Even now I'm still remembering details. Every few days I remember something else about it. I have to admit that I don't have enough faith in humanity to think that there's going to be any great change in the American psyche after this, I really don't, there's just too much distraction for people. People in the Western world are physiologically changed because of TV and everything. It's all just distraction. Very few Americans think for themselves. As I'm sure is the case in any country that's run by TV." He shakes his head. "They're going right back to all the same meaningless bullshit as we speak."