BOLOGNA’S Festa dei Lavoratori, the Workers Day so passionately celebrated in Italy’s most socialist city, is quite literally a washout. Revellers and curious tourists should be packing out the Piazza Maggiore this time of the evening, loitering around the bars and the Fontana di Nettuno, but only a solitary road-sweeping van waits in front of the Basilica di San Petronio. On a grand stage in the square, the Bolognese soft-rock band Bertolli gamely perform to a dwindling huddle of umbrellas as the torrential rain pours down.
It’s a dramatic setting for the final performance of Jim O’Rourke and Eiko Ishibashi’s debut European tour as a duo. These dates – taking place in Paris, Dublin, Bern and a handful of Italian cities – are also O’Rourke’s first performances outside Japan for almost 20 years. Since leaving Sonic Youth in 2005 and throwing himself headlong into life in Japan, he’s barely left the country, leading a hermetic, if prolific, existence.
“I really loved the idea that I moved to Japan and never played outside it again,” says O’Rourke, as he and partner Ishibashi hide from the rain in a restaurant. “I wanted to protect that idea. But now at least I can replace it with ‘He only played in Italy and Japan…’ That I can live with.”
Uncut has come to the capital of Emilia-Romagna to catch this lesser-spotted performance from O’Rourke, that rare musician who seems to have mastered songwriting – as on 1998’s Eureka or 2001’s Insignificance – production (for the likes of Wilco, Smog, Stereolab and Beth Orton) and the avant-garde (his collaborators have included Oren Ambarchi, John Fahey, Loren Connors and Merzbow). Yet we’re also here to discuss his first new Drag City release since 2015, the soundtrack to Kyle Armstrong’s Canadian prairie-gothic opus Hands That Bind.
“It’s always great to have something new from Jim,” says Drag City’s Rian Murphy. “We like Kyle Armstrong, and all of his work – is kind of like a Coen Brothers film, but without all that cutesy bullshit… Add the O’Rourkian tones and hear them sensually envelop Armstrong’s
