In A Moveable Feast Ernest Hemingway wrote about the notion of deleting a story’s narrative climax after it was written, to see if what came before and after the moment-of-truth would be powerful enough to suggest what had been taken out.
It’s an idea that would seem to apply to Jim O’Rourke, who throughout his career has made music that is pointedly suggestive without being overt. His sounds always play with ideas that run both in concert with and tangential to their musicality. More than anybody else working these days, he could rightfully be called a sort of sonic semiotician. But as a theorist, he would rather play at shaping coal than marvel at the diamond it would one day become.
http://beefheart.com/zine/articles/0109orourke.htm
