Eiko Ishibashi & Jim O’Rourke Announce ‘Pareidolia’ LP
For their 5th collab, the couple recorded a 2 week run of improvised lived dates through Europe, later editing them into a collage of textural soundscapes
New music from longtime partners and collaborators Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke (Gastr Del Sol, Sonic Youth, etc)! The pair’s upcoming album, Pareidolia, marks the 5th release for the Japanese songwriter/musician and the Chicago-born multi-instrumentalist/producer known for explorations in ambient, noise, and minimalism, as well as his immeasurable contributions to the worlds of indie and post-rock.
The couple, who live together in Tokyo, have contributed to each other’s projects over the years — O’rourke primarily through production, Eiko with piano and photography– but are known for maintaining a professional distance during collabs where they often send each other files of material they’ve worked on independently of one another. Pareidolia is born of a fairly unique process that is part improvised live recordings, part calculated loops, and edited audio collage.
The foundation of this latest effort was their first live shows together outside of Japan, performed and documented when the pair ventured through France, Switzerland, Italy, and Ireland for a 2-week tour in April 2023. After preparing separately and without discussion, Jim and Eiko would take the stage to merge and collide their sounds, summoning new and surprising results each night.
The press release elaborates:
“For each performance, their live signals — sounds from their laptops, with Eiko playing some flute, and both playing a bit of harmonica intermittently — were routed back to the hard drives to provide further material to experiment with the following night. Pareidolia’s final mix is one further rearrangement of these elements — say, a bit of Jim from Paris against Eiko in Dublin for a minute, before bringing them both back into the same room for a spell. The choices and edits represented here make yet another unique dialogue, as well as a kind of ‘best’ version of what they were doing on the tour.”
The new 5-song effort’s title of Pareidolia is an apt one, defined as “the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern; to see shapes or make pictures out of randomness.” The first 4 tracks on the LP average around 10 minutes a piece, followed by “Pareidolia (single edit)” at a much shorter 3:15 running time. We get our first sample of the album today in the form of that closer, which offers a beautiful, shimmering, and ominously swelling soundscape. Only time will tell how reflective this track is of the overall release. We expect a range of textures, colors, and tones to be expressed across its nearly 40-minute length.
Pareidolia will be released on August 29th through Drag City Records. Preorders are available now via the label and Bandcamp.
Check out the Mark Focus-directed music video for “Pareidolia (single edit)” below.