Eiko Ishibashi & Jim O’Rourke live in London: electronic ecstasy from a returning hero

Eiko Ishibashi & Jim O’Rourke
Union Chapel, London
April 13, 2026

Jim O’Rourke last performed in London in 2004, and a return did not seem likely. Even when the Chicago-born, Japan-based musician, engineer and producer was finally coaxed back on tour a few years ago, with his partner Eiko Ishibashi, it wasn’t certain he’d make it as far as the UK.

I interviewed the pair in Bologna in May 2023, and O’Rourke seemed set on just playing in the kind of places he’d like to go to on holiday. “This is the free vacation band,” he explained. “We’ll play where the food is good, which is why most of these shows have been in Italy.”

He even told me “I don’t think I’ll ever tour again”, preferring to stay in his studio in rural Japan. So if it felt special to see O’Rourke and Ishibashi perform in an ornate Bolognese church back then, it feels downright extraordinary to have him here at London’s Union Chapel. It’s fair to guess barely anyone here has seen him perform in the last 22 years. By the looks of it, some in attendance may not have been born the last time O’Rourke stepped foot in the UK.

His ‘pop’ albums, especially 1999’s playful Eureka, continue to find their fans, but that’s not what O’Rourke does these days (Ishibashi’s excellent song albums, such as last year’s sublime Antigone, are well worth exploring). Instead, he and Ishibashi have gradually built up their own project over the last few years: instrumental, electronic, longform and mostly improvised. For the seamless hour they play for tonight, he’s on laptop running the complex Kyma sound design software, she’s on a laptop too but often playing a flute through a looper and various pedals.

The format, concept and instrumentation is the same as on their 2023 tour, then, but the music they play tonight is completely different. Bologna’s set was harsher, a little musique concrète, a little more disconnected (you can hear a collage of that tour on their Pareidolia album, released last summer), but O’Rourke tells me they “threw everything out” after that tour – presumably loops, presets and ideas. Tonight is warmer, more ambient, a little more accessible, with the pair having built an even greater musical rapport.

The Union Chapel is a large space – experimental music of this kind doesn’t often get to rooms of this size – but the music the duo make still has a way of snaking beguilingly through the air; never hurrying, or even moving on its way anywhere, just being, gradually changing like weather.

The pair begin with Ishibashi’s flute and occasional sub-bass hits from O’Rourke, before warm bell tones and bubbling oceanic drones suggest Edgar Froese’s Aqua LP. They move into more freeform ambience with an insectoid undercurrent, adding eerie field recordings of animals, distant talking, the slithering of some creature. Discordant tones and pulsing bass take over, then synth arpeggions, never settling into a pattern.

The pair work so well together, rarely battling like some free improv, but moving as one, as if the hour-long piece has been painstakingly composed. At around the halfway point, Ishibashi moves back to flute, warped into the sound of a melting saxophone, while O’Rourke spits out arrhythmic drums like a spacey Autechre (incidentally another project that presents their new material as gradually evolving live performances). They move into a very still and sparse section, with ghostly, synthesised, gibbering voices, before things turn a little John Hassell with a flickering nighttime forest of percussion, Ishibashi creating trumpet tones with her flute.

This then fades to almost nothing but glassy reverberations and a scratchy field recording, until metallic beats and tropical noises suggest Harmonia and Brian Eno’s late-’70s collaboration. This breaks down, followed by the unfurling of lush synth pads and long loops of flute that gradually fade to silence.

It’s an astonishing set, a shifting soundscape seemingly composed out of thin air, never to be quite repeated, and it gets a very enthusiastic reception. Afterwards people queue up to speak to Ishibashi and O’Rourke, older fans and young people who may see the latter as some kind of mythical creature. There’s even a joyous reunion with some of O’Rourke’s cousins, who haven’t seen each other in the flesh for decades. Hopefully he can be tempted back again for more, sometime sooner than 2048.