Jim O’Rourke — I'm Happy and I'm Singing and 1,2,3,4
The thing that makes this stand out from the most ‘Laptop’ albums is the pure feeling, emotional and creative air that flows through-out the three lengthy pieces on offer on the original album. It feels all very human and grounded; concentrating on making beautifully, mood setting and quirky music that’s both wonderfully texture and toned, as well as been shifting and often multi-faceted. It never fall’s into the ‘laptop’ album cliché of been too clever and jittery for it’s own good. O’Rourke shifts the instrumental pallet (which includes guitar, organ, accordion and strings) via the laptop, but keeps the wonder and nuance of each instrument firmly in place; really he users technology as a tool to pull sonic gold from the organic instruments. I guess the best way to describe it sound wise is that it falls somewhere between: rich drone craft, guitar scaping, electrioncia and slight glicht-ness.
The second disk of unreleased material offers up another 3 tracks which total an hours running time & once more shows O’Rourke's wonderful talent for computer and laptop compositions. First up we have the rather hectic, jittering(but in a good way) and noisy yet harmonic sonic peaks and valleys of the relatively short 4 minutes of Lets Take it from the top. The we’re onto the moody guitar tones and dramatics of Getting The vapours, which is a wonderfully sonic canvas of building and subsiding tones for it’s near 40 minute running time. Then lastly we have the wonderful tinkling electro meets organic air of He who laughs. The tracks rich with vibe tone, drone textures and glitch drift and flow & later on the track drops into a wonderful almost lulling yet demented carnival feel.
A wonderful reissue of this classic album, that with the second disk makes a great album even better. My only criticism of the whole thing is that though the fold-out double digt-pak looks nice enough it’s all a bit too sparse; it would have been nice to have some liner notes with O’Rourke talking about the album conception and the origins of the tracks on the second disk.