Jim O’Rourke’s latest album, Eureka, features delicately finger-picked acoustic guitar, funereal New Orleans jazz, a Bacharach and David cover, and ambient washes of abstract sound, buoyed up on imaginative string arrangements. It is provocative and intelligent, asks subtle questions about how and why we consume music, yet is tuneful enough to sing in the bath and – despite O’Rourke’s free-noise background – your Mum would still recognise it as “proper music”.

However, such is O’Rourke’s low profile that a London listings magazine recently described Eureka as the unassuming 30-year-old’s second album, when in fact it’s the 30th to carry his name. Somehow Eureka has become a fixture of current “pick of the moment” columns, despite O’Rourke’s evident obscurity, despite its lack of radio airplay and despite the fact that the cover features a painting of a naked Sumo wrestler in lipstick holding a small stuffed rabbit. What is Jim O’Rourke suddenly doing right?

O’Rourke is currently in London producing Stereolab, far from his Chicago home. His back catalogue conjures a Romantic artist straight out of a Caspar David Friedrich painting, surveying the world with lofty detachment, but in fact he’s a small man in glasses and a green woolly hat, who is genuinely surprised you’ve heard anything he’s done. In his teens O’Rourke was making tape collages and coaxing everything out of his guitar but a regular chord, and by the age of 19 he’d forged working relationships with the British improvisers Eddie Prevost and Derek Bailey. Early 1990s solo albums such as Scend, Terminal Pharmacy and the two-inch CD Rules of Reduction, mixed drones and tones imbibed from the 1960s violinist Tony Conrad with the spatial awareness of the British anti-rockers AMM, and the odd Krautrock klang. Collaborations with Japanese and European noise-niks gave him a substantial international profile, admittedly within a Lilliputian musical landscape.

O’Rourke’s first connection with most consumers was as half of Gastr del Sol – the folkish avant-rock group, whose founder member David Grubbs was then beginning a long journey from his punk roots in Squirrelbait to the fully fledged cosmic Americana of his solo albums. “I was actually writing a lot of the more melodic songs in Gastr del Sol,” protests O’Rourke, “but people think I just did the weird noises.”

O’Rourke first encountered Grubbs in 1993, when he was assembling the studio group Brise-Glace. “I’d become obsessed with the idea of trying to figure out what makes music conform to the genre that it is. I wanted to make some kind of pseudo-documentary about this and present it as if it was about a real rock band. So I put together a band to watch the dynamic of how these people work.”
Thus Brise-Glace was a sort of anti-Monkees, configured artificially to examine rock’s internal organs at work.

“It seemed rock musicians felt constant frustration if they weren’t allowed to rock, and I wanted to constantly frustrate the urge to rock,” O’Rourke explains. “Not that I’m against ‘rocking’, but in any music there are established gestures that signify it as this type of music, and if you constantly frustrate expectation hopefully people eventually question why they expected certain things at all. That was the idea.”

Brise-Glace’s When in Vanitas album perhaps prepared O’Rourke for producing Rien, the 1995 comeback album by the reanimated 1970s avant-rock barbarians Faust. O’Rourke’s experience of the scary German metal bangers, whose most recent London show saw them clear the venue with CS gas, was not entirely pleasant: “This label had asked Faust to do a record. Then they showed up and everybody quickly discovered that it wouldn’t work. Faust didn’t really play much on the album.”

What? O’Rourke has let slip a scandal as shocking as the news that Geri Spice might not really have been such a great vocalist. “Yeah. It was mostly me. That’s what they wanted. They did a recording session that didn’t work, so they gave me tapes of their tour, and I found moments where a drum or a guitar note was alone, put everything on reel-to-reel and spliced every possible individual note out. Then I stayed in my room for a year with drums pinned up on one wall and guitars on the other, and hand-spliced every note on that album together. I tried to make a Faust record and not a Jim O’Rourke record, but it was difficult when I was playing about half of everything. I actually went broke because I spent all my money making that record. It doesn’t bother me though,” he says, and laughs madly in the way that only someone who really was bothered would. “And whenever I hear about the record being used for a commercial in Germany, and they got $100,000 for it, I just accept it.”

Not all O’Rourke’s experiences of his musical heroes have been so distressing. His 1997 collaboration with Sonic Youth actually outsold their subsequent studio album A Thousand Leaves, and it seems that producing Womblife, the 1996 album by the 1960s folk blues guitarist John Fahey, gave him the confidence to return to more expressly melodic music, such as 1997’s gorgeous acoustic suite Bad Timing. “Maybe,” he concurs, “but the finger-picking thing wasn’t the focus for me – it was the arrangements. There’s plenty of mistakes on Bad Timing, but I didn’t care. All the guitar playing was done first-take and then I spent eight months on the arrangements. Being obsessed with technique is something I can’t relate to.”

Eureka (out now on the Domino label) is a logical progression from Bad Timing, and O’Rourke’s most accessible album to date sees him making the journey from cacophony to melody in the opposite direction to the average ageing pop star desperate for a bit of artistic credibility. “I found after years of listening to avant-garde music it started to ring false. Scott Walker got across more profound feelings than any Faust piece. You can listen to his songs and think they’re beautiful, but if you just go a little beyond the surface…” Similarly, on their recent Hoffman Estates album, O’Rourke used editing and some beautiful arrangements to deliciously season improvised duets by the spiky guitarists Alan Licht and Loren

Mazzacane Connors, without compromising their distinct identity. “I try to do that. I don’t like doing things that I can do, so the challenge is to try to find a way of doing stuff that I can’t. Even when I’m making a record – and that record is about the act of making a record – I still want to respect the material. That’s why I really used to like Sparks.”

Sparks? The 1970s chart band with the keyboard player who looked like Hitler? “Yes. They were able to be self-commentating but still be pop, and that’s a hard line to be on.”

True. But if anyone can walk it, it’s Jim O’Rourke.