Design & Photography: Jon Wozencroft Cut by Jason @ Transition Side A: Despite the Water Supply Pt 1 4:12 Side B: Despite the Water Supply Pt 2 4:05 The seventh in the series of Touch Sevens - 7" vinyl only, with previous offerings from Fennesz, Chris Watson, Oren Ambarchi, Mika Vainio and others. 7" vinyl was the quintessential format for popular music. Today, it is an undervalued and mostly promotional medium, used as a fetishistic signpost to a time of musical authenticity and a "healthy" popular culture. It might seem like another retrograde step to launch a vinyl series just as the download format threatens to dominate, and indeed there is an element of "the rear view mirror"... the generation of Touch artists who grew up with vinyl [and cassette] still feeling a strong emotional attachment to it. This series is more than that... an overtly critical, non-digital statement is supported by treatments of audio work which cannot be applied to digital formats - the sonic texture, the use of a locked groove, the A & the B and the additional dimension of the visual counterpoint. As for the aspect of audience participation, we choose not to specify the RPM on the label, encouraging the listener to experiment with playback options and personal preferences. An attempt to make music that works at both speeds. The front cover might actually be the back cover... Over the last 20 years, besides his own music, Jim O'Rourke has worked with the Merce Cunningham Dance company, Takehisa Kosugi, Derek Bailey, and Tony Conrad amongst many others. He has produced albums for Beth Orton, Stereolab, John Fahey, Brigitte Fontaine, Faust, and Wilco and more. Between 1999 and 2005 he was a memeber of Sonic Youth. He has also scored films for directors Werner Herzog, Olivier Assayass, Shinji Aoyama, and Koji Wakamatsu and more. O'Rourke's own films were part of the 2004 and 2006 Whitney Bienniale and the 2005 Rotterdam Film Festival. He currently lives in Tokyo. Reviews: Boomkat: The seventh in Touch's impeccable 7" singles series, 'Despite The Water Supply' finds avant-garde icon Jim O'Rourke making some of the very finest drone music of his life. You can hear shades of that early, academic work in here - the organ-like sustain is clearly inherited from his late '80s and early '90s recordings, (most recently exemplified by his fantastic 'Long Night' reissue) but far from the static meditations that characterised those early emissions, these pieces are incredibly developed and intricately detailed, barely even hinting at structure and yet somehow sounding composed and resolved. Perhaps it's partially due to the short-form nature of the 7" but you feel there's an awful lot of activity packed into these two sides. Even those of you not ordinarily favourably disposed towards the genre might just be blown away by this stuff - it's quite some antidote to anyone under the impression that drone music is all about holding a note down on a synthesizer. Awesome. Aquarius (USA): Latest in Touch's 7" series, this one folks have been clamoring for, comes from Mr. Jim O'Rourke, a name that should no doubt be familiar to most folks by now! Brise Glace, Gastr Del Sol, SONIC YOUTH, as well as about a million more, not to mention a vast body of solo work. Well before O'Rourke was an in demand producer, a guest guitarist, dabbling in noise rock and Appalachia, he was a master of the drone, and this 2 part single track 7" harkens back to those days, with an amazing and beautiful arrangement of buzz and whir, of excited strings and resonating metal. It's almost a shame the track had to be split up on a 7" as the two parts flow so perfectly into each other. Beginning with a deep resonant buzz, sounds like a guitar, but could be a harmonium, wheezing and whirring, warm and thick and lustrous, bits of feedback lace the blurred drift, over the top delicate high end melodies, float and shimmer, becoming more and more active until they seem to be driving the piece, the whole thing strangely looped and weirdly melancholy, beneath the track, deep rumbling swells pulse and throb. By the second side, the sound has gotten more abrasive, much more scraping and metal buzz, electronic streaks, the sound tangled and constantly shifting, managing to sprawl into an expanse of beautifully noisy dronemusic. As always beautiful cover by Touch head honcho Jon Wozencroft, and like the rest in the series, probably limited. The Wire (UK): Brilliant solo return by the master of space and time. The music is a gorgeous, shifting electronic landscape in which rugs are pulled from under our feet, only to reveal more goddam rugs. Of intricate design! Some of the textures feel guitaric, but there's no overt string manipulation. Just fingers and rugs. Man are there rugs. [Bryon Coley]
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