Jim O'Rourke - Long Night mp3 album

Long Night was recently rereleased as Steamroom 27 on Bandcamp.

Drones. Long Night is a long barrage of drones swirling around the air transmuting, interacting, evolving for more than 2 hours. These drones, they do not kill, but they are killer drones. A scenery is set by the ensuing atmosphere: A long hot night in the summer, in a small one or two story house in the country, or maybe a wooden lounge. People are hanging around, but you don't see them speaking, or they just whisper low and mute. The lights are dimed and everything seems hypnagogic. In the center of the house a man stands leaning over a synth. He stays there working knobs and patch cables as a true alchemist, he has all the time in the world. He creates and conducts; he breeds life into hertzian sprites. They roam around the air vibrating and resonating with all the surfaces. People are sitting down, they are congregating in the halls and some come to the porch and look at the clear sky, while the drones fly away out the door and into the distance. The point? To be there. Long Night by Jim O'Rourke is a record that demands deep listening. There is a great number of wave phenomena and sound filtering, to be able to catch it all will require concentration akin to the effort of meditation. It is a record about sound morphology, escape velocity and personal abstraction. While drones have an apparent simplicity at face value, complexity is the true characteristic of this work and Jim O’Rourke puts to the test the famous lesson by La Monte Young, that sounds are interesting in and of it selves and they should be played for a long time. Long Night will be a great listening if you're by yourself, but it will be even better if you share it with someone. It will develop a solemn ambience, an unawkward silence of resonating contemplation – a true demonstration of intimacy and communing. Someone will always ask "what's this we're hearing?", and you know you've just presented them with something grand and new.

Part One of this work really does drone on and on and on and on, relentless in its monodrony (my word). However, just when you’re almost at your wits end, after nigh 90 minutes of drowning in dreary drone with barely a perceptible harmonic variation and very little texture to speak of, it suddenly erupts with uplifting and spiralling chords, made all the more dramatic by the preceding stagnation. The listener is left high in the dronament. A sneaky trick Mr O’Rourke, but, I must admit, very effective.