Narc. Magazine Online
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Elodie A Roy discovers a harmonious, ghostly and collaborative new album by alt electronic singer songwriter
Drag City
29.08.25
Pareidolia is the art of seeing shapes in the clouds. It is an appropriate title for this new collaborative album between experimental musicians Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke. Together they’ve composed four long tracks – as uncertain and slippery as clouds. Every now and then a clear image appears, before disintegrating again. There are muffled, fragmented voices – surface noise – the thin, barely recognisable sound of a harmonica. Distant flutes. Pareidolia is a memory of a memory.
The album combines recordings from shows the duo played in Europe in 2023. It creates (rather than replicates) a series of past moments. For all its ghostliness, the album conveys a strong sense of presence and possibility: as if the past were new.
