As a full-time member of Wilco, Mikael Jorgensen’s ideas are always a part, and never the whole of bandleader Jeff Tweedy’s songs. There’s a case to be made for Jorgensen’s prowess as a singer-songwriter in his own right, but he’s made it difficult in the past. Quindar, his new space-themed project with musician/art historian James Merle Thomas, paints a picture of a songwriter again stopping just short of the sublime, even as he gets within inches.
The one album where Jorgensen showcased his innate touch with a hook—2009’s All Is Golden, released under the name Pronto—flew almost completely under the radar. Pronto isn’t even listed among the numerous projects that get the spotlight on Jorgensen’s website. All Is Golden’s droll AM-inspired indie rock remains lost in the shuffle, along with the compositional acumen that went into its making.
In 2013, Jorgensen and partner Greg O’Keeffe released their self-titled album, on which Jorgensen replaced his original guitar and piano parts with synths. Even that decision didn’t cover up the inherent tunefulness of the tracks, but they sounded incomplete, as if Jorgensen were building them up into songs and simply neglected to sing over them. It’s not that Jorgensen’s music necessarily needs singing—he has a knack for giving his keyboard parts the kind of heartfelt drama that’s typically reserved for lead vocals. But on songs like “Where to Begin” and “Precious Like a Sneer,” Jorgenson’s charmingly off-kilter voice synergizes with the other instruments for the kind of power he should be pursuing more.
No such luck on Quindar’s debut Hip Mobility, which frustrates as much as it entices, even more so than the Mikael Jorgensen & Greg O’Keeffe album, its older spiritual twin. Constructed around archival NASA recordings, Hip Mobility contains no singing at all—which is quite unfortunate because this time Jorgensen outdoes himself, sustaining a level of majesty with his sounds from the very first note. At times, he doesn’t even wait for the middle-end section of a track to deliver the climax, either with a sweeping key change or with layers of sounds that open up onto breathtaking aural vistas. Literally, every single track contains an example of this in some form.
So what’s the problem with an instrumental album that tips its hat, as the liner notes explain, to three visual artists from the ’60s and ’70s who satirized the space program? Well, for one, Jorgensen and Thomas (whose doctoral dissertation “explores abstract art, experimental architecture, and radical design of the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde, as related to NASA”) didn’t actually make an ambient album laced with found sounds. Had they done so, the music would match the conceptual intent laid out thusly in the liners:
Strewn across corporate history offices and government filing cabinets throughout the country, the archival recordings are grounded in the minutiae of a given historical moment, yet tempered by our interest in separating that data point from its context[...] deciding in some cases to go so far as to fully obscure the original piece of archival audio with which we began.
To their credit, Jorgensen and Thomas actually achieved their goal: only the first and final tracks on the album contain obvious space-program samples in the form of spoken radio communication. (The rest of the source sounds consist of the radio signal tones from which the album draws its title.) But as much as their explanation reads like an over-baked artist statement for a college art project, the duo structured the music in a standard pop mold. For the third album in a row, Jorgensen has proven himself to be masterful at carving arrangements so that all the parts work in tandem in a perfect balance between form and function, not a skill to be taken lightly or under-utilized.
Tunes like “Wembley,” “Choco Hilton,” pivot along on a sturdy backbone of electronic beats that recall early-period Amon Tobin, etc, while the acoustic guitar strumming on “Italian Conversation” lands close to pop-leaning electro-organic hybrids like Tycho and the Album Leaf. “Oranganus” even recreates the club-friendly thump of house music. Jorgensen and Thomas have done such a thorough job of carving out a pocket that your ear immediately points to the space where vocals would go. They’ve recently said that the samples are supposed to “take the place” of lyrics, but with the NASA samples mostly obscured from center stage, Hip Mobility plays like the “TV mix” of an album whose vocals have been removed so the songs can appear on TV and in film.
The son of recording engineer Joe Jorgensen and a longtime staffer at John McEntire’s SOMA studio, it seems only natural for Mikael Jorgensen to prioritize sounds over songs. Indeed, he wears the tinkerer-eccentric hat with a great deal of flair. But Hip Mobility barely conceals the inner songwriter that’s been straining to come forward for his entire discography. It’s about time he wore that hat too.
