Pareidolia is both a live album and not a live album. It is Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke’s fifth release as a duo, and is a document of their 2023 European tour. But rather than simply recording a whole show, or presenting a selection of individual tracks from different shows, the pair have layered various parts from across the tour into each of Pareidolia’s four tracks. It’s a combination of collage, palimpsest and a kind of musical knitting. The process began even before the tour had finished, with recorded elements of earlier shows being woven into later ones.
To anyone familiar with either artist’s output, it should come as no surprise that they have chosen to eschew traditional paths to recording an album. Both are born experimentalists. Ishibashi is best known for her soundtrack work on the films of Ryusuke Hamaguchi and has collaborated with Merzbow, the infant terrible of Japanese noise, while O’Rourke’s is a stalwart of the Chicago improv scene, playing with Fennesz, Nurse With Wound, Brigitte Fontaine and countless others while keeping up a consistently excellent solo career.
The pair live together, but their creative partnership is a dialogue between distance and closeness: they prepare their music separately and don’t discuss it before sharing it with one another. This format is key to the constant evolution of their art, through elements of improvisation, surprise and reaction. It means that their music, even when it is soft and beatless, has a quality of quickness that sets it apart from much avant-garde music.
The album is split into four parts: Par, ei, do and lia. It begins with crunchy improvised noise, itchy electronics, a shifting drone and the occasional crash and squeak that sound like the opening and closing of doors. A softer, almost neoclassical element soon breaks through. Despite the circuitous route taken from live performance to hard drive to sonic workshop to recording studio, everything seems to fall into place naturally: the flutter and the squall are in perfect balance. Like much experimental music it can be approached from two opposite angles. On one hand it can be treated academically, with a listener engaging with every nuance, teasing out every hint of melody, identifying the place of every instrument and every twiddle of every electronic knob. Or it can be a meditative listening experience, an exercise in flow or clarity or self-negation. It is to Pareidolia’s credit that it stands up to both approaches.
The piece’s four quarters all run seamlessly together, but the mood shifts throughout. Early in the second part, ei, it develops an oceanic feel, a kind of tidal pull, which is then quickly replaced by something dry and skittering and more like breath than water. An off-kilter rhythmic element is ushered in via some percussive thuds in the background, before an icy tinkling and Ishibashi’s drawn-out flute notes create a vivid and wintry atmosphere.
The third quarter is defined by glitchy electronica. Human voices are minced and regurgitated alongside insect-like clicks and sinister swishes, while in the background glassy swathes of ambience provide a kind of sonic mirror against which everything seems to redouble. For a while, when the voices and glitches die away, it settles into an uncanny, nervy kind of nostalgia, always alert to possible changes within its own structure, equal parts calming and creepy. It dovetails into a final extended fadeout, where futuristic electronica shares space with stately classicism. The strange burbles and trills sound almost organic, the emissions of an unrecognisable lifeform. But of course this might just be a case of the listener building a narrative into the sound and hearing what isn’t there, a possibility hinted at by the album’s title.
Pareidolia is a subtle and teasing record, beautiful and sometimes bewildering. It has an engrossing element that resembles the arc of a story, which is difficult to achieve in improvisational music but which gives you an insight into how closely and how well Ishibashi and O’Rourke work together, and how much background work they put into this intuitive, cohesive album.
Pareidolia (August 29th, 2025) Drag City