- Jim O'Rourke, Jos Smolders
- Albumin
- Series: Moving Furniture Records
- Format: Vinyl
- Jim O'Rourke
- &
- Jos Smolders
- Albumin
- Series: Moving Furniture Records
- Format: Vinyl
Jim O’Rourke and Jos Smolders teamed up again after their first collaboration, Additive Inverse from 2021. Over a period of three years, both artists worked in sessions of a day, each in their own studio.
The result is sometimes like a warm cloud of sounds, suddenly breaking up into a rhythmic, irregular pattern, after which it dives into introverted mindsets. The music is in constant flux
The project followed the same workflow, but this time Jim took the lead and kicked off with a salvo of sounds that he extracted from his Kyma System. Both Jos and Jim were quite interested in the spectral character of sounds. Jim applied Kyma algorithms while Jos granulated his basic recordings. That way, textures are built, quite slowly moving from warm to gritty, from hard surfaces to deep sonic wells.
Reviews
The Wire Magazine, Bill Meyer
SoundOhm Newsletter
Building upon the territories of sonority that graced 2021’s “Additive Inverse”, Jim O’Rourke & Jos Smolders return to Moving Furniture Records with “Albumin”, their second outing with the label as a duo.
Harnessing the towering talents of two of the most refined voices in contemporary electroacoustic practice, comprising two side-long works rooted in both of its artists’ interest in the spectral character of sounds, O’Rourke and Smolders dive off the deep end of pure sonic abstractions, interweaving stunningly rendered textures and harmonics into a disarming sense of musicality and pregnant ambience, culminating as one of the most engrossing experimental releases to appear thus far in 2026.
Igloo Magazine, James Batista
Jim O’Rourke and Jos Smolders don’t need much of an introduction—at least not in the traditional sense. O’Rourke, the Chicago-born experimental musician, composer, and producer, has spent decades moving between post-rock (Gastr del Sol), indie rock (Sonic Youth), avant-garde improvisation (collaborations with Derek Bailey, Loren Connors, Oren Ambarchi), film scoring (Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car), and solo electroacoustic work released through his Steamroom series. Jos Smolders, the Dutch sound artist and founding member of the electroacoustic ensemble THU20, has been researching electronics since 1980. He started with tape experiments as a teenager, quit architecture studies at Delft Technical University to pursue sound full-time, and has since built a career around meticulous sound design, mastering, and restoration work at his EARLabs Studios. Their first collaboration, Additive Inverse (2021), was a careful exchange of sounds built over time. Albumin follows the same workflow, but this time O’Rourke took the lead, kicking off with a salvo of sounds extracted from his Kyma System.
Uncut Magazine, Jon Dale
