Jim O'Rourke

A road movie about Yoko, a frustrated part-time worker who hitchhikes to her hometown of Hirosaki, Aomori, where she has not returned for 24 years, after hearing the news of her father's death.

A hired hand's plans to take over his boss farm are shattered when the landowner's son returns to claim his birthright.

Presented virtually at ISSUE Project Room Artist Fund Benefit Oct. 2020.

Presented virtually at ISSUE Project Room Artist Fund Benefit Oct. 2020.

In May 1997, Tim Taylor, creative force behind the beloved Dayton, Ohio rock weirdos BRAINIAC, was on the verge of his band signing to a major record label when his life was cut tragically short by a freak accident. He was 28 years old. Devastated, his family, friends and fans were forced to pick up the pieces. This film explores the history and legacy of Taylor and one of the 90s most original bands.

A poem about grief and the artificial, a copy of a copy of a copy, a therapeutic slow cinema meditation on solitude and the psychoanalytic and healing aspects of karaoke and all it implies, its emotional mechanics, modern art as endless duplication, the Real within the “false”. A love letter to Japan, channelling Marker and Benning into a spiritual reimagining of a Totoro hunt, a Shinto funeral rite for ghosts caught between worlds, and ideally, an antidote to Matsumoto's Atman. Featuring the Steamroom compositions of Jim O’Rourke.

Follows an unnamed protagonist as he returns to his childhood home following the tragic death of his brother. He struggles with loss as fall gives way to winter and he reluctantly assumes responsibility for the dying family farm where his mother and sister still live. This quiet and intimate work draws the viewer into a meditative rural space as the man attempts to reconcile his past and present.

Borrowing its title from a treatise by Aristotle, the latest film by Makino Takashi is an abstract work that finds its drive in the clash between light and darkness. Entirely composed of superimposed images of Tokyo’s landscape and water sites, the film takes its rhythm from the cycles of repetition that are the pillars of life and civilisation. As light emerges from the chaos, Jim O’Rourke’s ambient drone sets the tone for what is to come.

Feature documentary on the pioneering life and work of iconoclastic filmmaker/musician/composer/artist Tony Conrad.

The Creeping Garden is an independently-produced feature-length documentary, directed by Tim Grabham and Jasper Sharp and with an original soundtrack by Jim O’Rourke, depicting the world of myxomycetes, or plasmodial slime moulds, and the diverse array of research currently being conducted around them. The film boasts stunning original macroscopic time-lapse footage of these overlooked organisms, filmed within its natural habitat and in a controlled laboratory setting, and features interviews with artists, researchers and scientists involved in the fields of the visual arts, music, mycology, computing and robotics to explore ideas of biological-inspired design, emergence theory, unconventional computing and scientific modelling.

After losing everything in a tsunami, 10-year-old Hana is taken in by 26-year-old distant relative Jungo Kusarino. They live as father and daughter but share a profound sense of loss. Jungo works as a cook for the coast guard, leaving young Hana alone for days at a time. In wintry Hokkaido, Jungo and Hana both desire to fill their empty, love-starved hearts as they set foot into a forbidden world. Eventually, an elder benefactor in their small town learns of their illicit relationship. When he tries to separate them for Hana's own good, it provokes her emotional rage. Soon after, a murder quietly occurs atop the ice floes. With their dark secret, Jungo and Hana escape to Tokyo. However...

A short documentary film contrasting the Northern Lights with decaying man-made debris littered throughout the landscape surrounding the town of Churchill, Manitoba in Canada's Arctic. The film touches on the regenerative power of nature and the futility of mankind's struggle against natural processes of decay.

Seeking to exact revenge upon Yoji, Yukio travels to an area surrounded by the sea, desert and lava topped mountains. There, Yukio meets mysterious Rika and becomes enchanted by her presence. While, Yukio can't get Rika out of his mind, he faces off against Masakazu, a former subordinate of Yoji, and a detective chasing Rika.

Takashi Makino’s source of inspiration, our place in the world and the universe, never seems to dry up in view of the never-ending flow of immersive films. Generator may well be the earthiest of his films so far, made as a reaction to the Fukushima disaster. A reality check, but in the world that Makino shows, this can never be achieved without looking inwards too.

Takashi Makino’s source of inspiration, our place in the world and the universe, never seems to dry up in view of the never-ending flow of immersive films. Generator may well be the earthiest of his films so far, made as a reaction to the Fukushima disaster. A reality check, but in the world that Makino shows, this can never be achieved without looking inwards too.

The bittersweet events in the lives of people in Hakodate, a regional city connected by a streetcar network. A laid-off man and his younger sister go up a mountain to see the first sunrise of the year. Meanwhile, Haruo has inherited his family's gas business, but things aren't going well in his new endeavor and he becomes increasingly frustrated.

An immersive work that uses skilled manipulation of the film surface and a powerful drone soundtrack to create a layered and dense universe of controlled chaos. In about eighteen minutes we experience life to the fullest, from birth to death and eternity.

An immersive work that uses skilled manipulation of the film surface and a powerful drone soundtrack to create a layered and dense universe of controlled chaos. In about eighteen minutes we experience life to the fullest, from birth to death and eternity.

Experimental documentary about Japanese experimental musician Otomo Yoshihide. Includes interviews with multiple musicians, artists, and writers as well as live footage.

The four elements referred to as "water", "flame", "wind" and "earth" in this film all exist individually while responding to each other, by fighting and loving each other, foster the concept of a world in each individual's "subjectivity"

A presentation of an expanding formation of "Elements of Nothing". The systematic harsh noise shaped by water and trees gives birth to a storm of novel imagination in the viewer's emotions.

In the bleak, disturbing and suspenseful universe of H.P. Lovecraft, endless horrors await. From ravaging cannibals to ancient rituals come to life, there's no escape for these hapless souls, whether they come across the Danwich outskirts or even the gruesome cover of the Necronomicon.

The film is told in three acts, beginning with a historical background of Japan's student movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, mostly using archive footage and a narrator. The second act follows the formation of the group to their mountain training camps in the southern Japanese Alps. It emphasizes the dogmatic (and eventually hypocritical) bullying of the group by Mori and Nagata, with 12 members being killed for infractions as small as improperly cleaning a gun, wearing make-up, and kissing. The third act shows the splitting up of the group after two members run off. It follows one group of five members to Karuizawa and a hostage-taking and police standoff known as the Asama-Sansō incident.

During a suicide attack on an airport, the hand grenade of 'M', one of three terrorists, malfunctions, leaving him captured. Exposed to maltreatment in prison, he slowly loses his grip on reality as he is forced to confront his ideological convictions.

For this film, Takashi Makino allowed himself to be inspired by the earth. In a never-ending stream of images, we recognize elements from the forest that he then reduces to an abstraction. The film came about as a classical composition in which the picture and the musical contribution of Jim O’Rourke link up seamlessly and lead the mood in turn. A sense of freedom is what predominates.

Her Noise was an exhibition which took place at South London Gallery in 2005 with satellite events at Tate Modern and Goethe-Institut, London. Her Noise gathered international artists who use sound to investigate social relations, inspire action or uncover hidden soundscapes. The exhibition included newly commissioned works by Kim Gordon & Jutta Koether, Hayley Newman, Kaffe Matthews, Christina Kubisch, Emma Hedditch and Marina Rosenfeld. A parallel ambition of the project was to investigate music and sound histories in relation to gender, and the curators set out to create a lasting resource in this area.

Footage from 2005’s Festival Art Rock in Saint-Brieuc, France, featuring Metric, Sonic Youth, Jeanne Balibar, and other acts.

With the aid of a layered construction of the image, Takashi has managed to capture the different reflections of light on the surface of water. The acoustic-noise-like music and the dancing particles of light move like swarms of microorganisms and in this way slowly cover the entire screen.

With Herzog's direction, Richard Thompson leads a small group of musicians into creating Grizzly Man's evocative soundtrack.

Quintessential alternative rockers, Sonic Youth, celebrate free-form experimentalism while reinforcing their performance-art driven tradition in this Soundstage performance, recorded on May 7, 2003 at WTTW Grainger Studio in Chicago. The band, which settles just outside the realm of definition, delivers a part rock, part free-form noise, part avant-garde punk performance which features a new song "Sympathy for the Strawberry."

Filmed April 12, 2003 at a benefit concert held at and for The Anthology Film Archives, the international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of avant-garde and independent cinema. In addition to screening films for the public, AFA houses a film museum, research library and art gallery. The event, which raised money for the Archives and celebrated the life and work of avant-garde film maker Stan Brakhage, featured Sonic Youth providing an improvised instrumental collaboration with silent Brakhage’s films. The band performed with drummer/percussionist Tim Barnes (Essex Green, Jukeboxer, Silver Jews).

Following the unexplained suicide of his wife Liza, website designer Wilson Joel turns to huffing gasoline fumes and remote control gaming while avoiding an inevitable conflict with his mother-in-law.

A French corporation goes head-to-head with an American web media company for the rights to a 3-D manga pornography studio, resulting in a power struggle that culminates in violence and espionage.

Filmmaker Peter Mettler embarks on a mission that takes him around the world. He is determined to record the diverse modes of transcendence that people in different cultures adopt in order to live life to the fullest. As he traverses civilization and wilderness and encounters a range of lifestyles and ideas, the filmmaker's mind-expanding trip around the world grows into a poem of images and sounds, reflecting the fragmented but alluring worlds it attempts to capture.

Pia is coming home for Christmas after traveling in England for about 6 months. She wants to catch up with her boyfriend, Kristoffer, who was supposed to have joined her on the trip, but backed out at the last minute. Finding him, however, is turning out to be quite a task. While searching, she meets several more or less disgruntled and dissatisfied people. And when Santa turns up things start happening...

This portrait of the New York band Sonic Youth marking the band’s 20th anniversary covers its history from the beginnings to today. Numerous video clips and films of live gigs as well as interviews with, and reminiscences of, collaborators over the years will be used to document the musical development of one of the most innovative and influential bands of the last two decades. Contemporaries include former mentor Glenn Branca, composer and conductor of guitar symphonies which had a seminal influence on participating musicians such as Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore, who went on to become Sonic Youth’s guitarists. The band members‘ numerous creative arts projects and other musical activities – in particular improvised music – will be covered in depth.