Imagine: It’s sometime in the back half of the 19th century, America. You’re sitting in the parlor of your mansion, or in the only room of your shack; things are dusty and smell like sweat and hair, no matter how wealthy you may be. You don’t own a phonograph, and you don’t know who Tony Hawk is, but you have an inkling of how good the word “shred” is going to feel when it enters the local slang. Suddenly, a tall, elegant figure with beautifully maintained fingernails emerges from some corner of the room, carrying a guitar. He says in a soft voice, “I have a transmission for you, from the coming few centuries. Would you like to hear it? I figured you wouldn’t have a dongle, so I brought my guitar.”
You may be apprehensive, but you shouldn’t be. Shane happens to be an internationally renowned virtuoso of the guitar. Specifically, he’s the kind of virtuoso who is as deep on style as he is on technique. His technical prowess is almost maddeningly complete; aiming paradoxically for the yards-long target called “breadth” he’s somehow hit all of it, 500 arrows piercing every pore of the landscape. He has that much technique not for the sake of guitar worship but to best bring the music forth clearly and in his own hand, like a pearl formed in a specific sea. I know this because I’ve sat next to him in multiple countries and American states and seen him deliver transmissions of that extreme honesty, with that extreme capability.
Like Derek Bailey’s “Ballads,” this record brings you into the room and the breath of a true musician whose mastery does not overshadow his appreciation of the music that inspired it. The title, “Repertoire,” underscores the beautiful songs he chose to perform, all standards of 20th century musical excellence. The in-time persistence of his blues-walked “Lonely Woman.” The grand registral descent he performs on “Pithecanthropus Erectus,” like a rare document of the trip down from Everest. Dig how “Better Get Hit in Your Soul,” emphasizes the folk blues water coursing through Mingus’s Ellingtonia, how Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14” and the Minutemen’s “Cohesion” sound so much older than Cage’s “Totem Ancestors.” “Repertoire” puts forth the idea that time is arrangement: time and arrangement are each only as successful as they are faithful to their origins and expansive in their style.
Again, lest you fear the alien smoothness some associate with the concept “virtuoso,” remember here we’re dealing with a time- traveler. His virtuosity is home grown, born of human work rather than some abstract or divine touch; the aim is not to go beyond the realm of human technical possibility but to expand it in the direction of human, meaning, timely. This guy can play anything, and for you, for this record, which sounds intimate and as present as a transmission from a time-traveler, he chooses to.
— Wendy Eisenberg
Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet Midwest Tour 2024
4/29 Philadelphia / Solar Myth
4/30 NYC / Le Poisson Rouge
5/1 Keene, NH / Nova Arts
5/3 Chicago / Two Shows (8:30 Sold Out / 10:30) Constellation
5/4 Rock Island / Rozz Tox
5/5 Iowa City / Trumpet Blossom
5/6 Minneapolis / Cedar Cultural Center
PAL-080 Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet Gatefold 2LP
“Four Guitars Live”
NOTE: Shops & distros worldwide can contact Revolver USA for stock.
As Bill Orcutt’s most mature and exhilarating LP to date, Music for Four Guitars was a slab of undeniable Apollonian beauty. Its approachability and obvious novelty landed it not only on the year- end lists of every key-pushing codger in the underground in 2022, but also on NPR in the form of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, an ensemble assembled to perform this music and featuring Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish in addition to Orcutt. But while their Tiny Desk Concert gave a whiff of the quartet’s easy intimacy, the sterile confines of the virtual recital medium still left a puzzle unsolved: how might these brutally mannered bricks of minimalist counterpoint sound on a stage in front of actual breathing bodies?
This was the question foremost in my mind when I first saw the quartet in San Francisco a few months before this double live LP was recorded. I was already familiar with the prowess of Eisenberg and Mendoza, two of the most technically intimidating shredders to blast out of the noise/improv underground, and knew Parish as the mastermind behind the epic translation of Orcutt’s quartet recordings into a fully notated score. I was ready to be “blown away" — and I most assuredly was. The quartet navigated Orcutt’s jaggedly spiraling right angles into the shining core of the compositions with joyous ease, faithful to the originals in nearly every way (though their tempos were slightly ramped up, Blakey style, to communicate their breathless rush). The renditions were flawless, stellar and inspiring. I had expected nothing less.
Which leads us to this album, Four Guitars Live, recorded in November of 2023 at Le Guess Who? festival during the quartet’s first European tour. The true essence of this set is not simply in its faithfulness to the source compositions, but in the group’s easy familiarity (no doubt the result of weeks on the road) and the generosity of their improvisations, both collective and solo. Orcutt, clearly cognizant of both the caliber of his collaborators and the
singularity of their voices, has given everyone room to stretch out, and all have delivered some of their most moving passages to date.
One of this record’s great thrills for me is imagining a listener, perhaps unfamiliar with the outer limits of contemporary guitar improvisation (or the Tzadik catalog), slammed into catatonia by Mendoza’s liquefying lines on Out of the corner of the eye, then revived and healed by the languid, breathy lines of Parish’s unaccompanied, spaced-out breakdown of the track’s main theme, finally only to be crushed by Eisenberg’s staggering extended solo on Only at dusk (somehow channeling both Eugene Chadbourne and Buck Dharma).
There’s another peak, which begins at the end of side B, in Orcutt’s own languid solo, encapsulating the flowing focus of his recent solo LPs, and serving as an introduction to the next side’s ensemble tour de force, the psychic heart of the album, On the horizon: its melodic core passing first to Orcutt, launching into a sublime solo turn by Eisenberg, a duo of Parish and Mendoza, before parachuting back into the ensemble for a smashup rendition of Barely visible and Glimpsed while driving (renamed Barely driving) knitted together with an softly bubbling ensemble improvisation. The transfer is orchestrated yet seamless, its tonal form undeniable even in the presence of obvious dissonance.
The breadth of Four Guitars Live gives lie to the false notion that agile, polytonal improv is necessarily without soul, is necessarily inaccessible. Rather, Four Guitars posits a human avant-garde music that the most conservative will recognize as virtuosic and revel in its classic intervals, boiling counterpoint, and precisely- layered facets. Even the rockers in your life might dig it, so why not pass it on? — TOM CARTER
PAL-078 Joe McPhee / Tashi Dorji / Bill Orcutt LP
“A Mouth at Both Ends”
“Thursday, June 7th, ISSUE presents an evening of improvisations between celebrated four-string guitarist Bill Orcutt, unbound Bhutanese guitarist Tashi Dorji, and Poughkeepsian creative jazz originary Joe McPhee. While all three musicians are tireless collaborative improvisers and iconoclast solo performers, each possesses an enduring aesthetic approach that’s as independent as it is profoundly empathic.
The evening features two duo sets (Orcutt & Dorji, McPhee & Dorji), culminating with the three coming together for a debut trio performance – a combination that’s sure to yield unseen results. Here, Dorji’s erceness is the consistent thread within each conversation, a discourse owing between the mutually frenetic stylings of Orcutt and deeply intentional mediations of McPhee.
Bill Orcutt’s authorship of a highly disruptive version of “The Great American Songbook” lls chasms of negative historical space – with ows of fragmented notes revising, interpolating, and critiquing the form. Here, Orcutt expands the ruptures of songcraft, breaking each melody into in nitesimal pieces, coding each part into new narratives. Marked by an inimitable, sputtering style, Orcutt’s prophetic stature in American guitar music is indisputable given his constant re-discovery of the vibrancy of “rotten” historical materials – either in guitar song, or in noise during years prior in Harry Pussy. In the words of critic Matthew Philips, “he brings these pieces of history out from the invisibility where they had festered ever since their last audition.”
Tashi Dorji’s own omnivorous skewering of guitar traditions has developed a highly idiosyncratic take on on the instrument, one de ned by his non-stop movement and profound openness to technique. Although much as been said about his parallelisms with the stark improvisational world of Derek Bailey and meditative energy of Ben Chasny, Dorji has reached the point where his hybrid style has amalgamated into a new form altogether. Although his lawless approach can often express itself ercely, with roots in the more savage strands of avant-jazz or free folk, his playing can quickly deviate to impressionistic, emotive gesturing – harmonizing between quiet chord-sustain and knobby, quick passages.
The instrumental outlier, Joe Mcphee serves as the non-sequitur in response to Orcutt and Dorji’s guitar vexations. Combining his jazz lineage with extended instrumental and electronic techniques, McPhee often approaches his music conceptually by “disrupting an apparent sequence and arriving at the solution from another angle.” Deeply informed by this spirit, McPhee’s notion of “sideways thinking” in creative improvisation led him to develop the concept of “Po Music,” described as a “process of provocation” (Po is a language indicator to show that provocation is being used) to “move from one xed set of ideas in an attempt to discover new ones.” McPhee concludes, “It is a Positive, Possible, Poetic Hypothesis.” The application of Po principles to creative improvisation are likely to be at play in conversation with the wild stylings of Orcutt and Dorji."
Credits
releases December 25, 2023
Recorded by Bob Bellerue Mixed by James Emrick Photography by Cameron Kelly Courtesy ISSUE Project Room
EU / UK Tour November 2023 11/08 Kunstencentrum, Ghent BE 11/10 Music Unlimited Fest, Wels AT 11/11 Le Guess Who? Fest Utrecht NL 11/12 Le Guess Who? (Bill & Ava solo) Utrecht NL 11/13 Pardon To Tu Warsaw PL 11/14 Cafe Oto (solo etc) London UK 11/15 London Jazz Fest, London UK 11/16 St Mary the Virgin, Shrewsbury UK 11/17 Alice, Copenhagen DK 11/18 Risk, Stavanger NO
“I was hanging out with Bill Orcutt at the 930 Club nearly 30 years ago, watching a famous post-rock band (who shall remain nameless, but whose moniker contained two- and-a-half times more articles and conjunctions than nouns) when he said: "This band is like my band in college – all major 7th and 9h chords.” I relate this to emphasize that in the case of Bill Orcutt and Harry Pussy, the seemingly untutored ooze of “Please Don’t Come Back From the Moon” and “Girl With Frog” had its genesis in something far more Apollonian than is usually understood. It’s debatable whether or not Watt, the duo of Orcutt and drummer Tim Koffley featured on Recorded in Miami, is the above- referenced grad-school band. Watt is not resplendent with jazz chords, but it’s certainly more tutored, offering a mannered link between the contemporaneous Thunders-esque punk of Orcutt’s Trash Monkeys and Harry Pussy’s mayhem. The continuity with Harry Pussy is more than temporal – Recorded in Miami is Orcutt’s first use of the four string guitar, and Harry Pussy claimed the same amp and drum kit. The resemblance more or less ends there.
To further put Recorded in Miami – made on Orcutt’s Walkman, Rat Bastard’s North Miami studio, and South Miami’s Natural Sound (total bill $289) – into context, consider the fecundity of the underground music world as the ‘80s rolled into the '90s. It’s hard to relate to those who missed it, but it was a time when post-hardcore hadn’t quite given way to the bloat of grunge, when the Minutemen held sway (for the moment) over Led Zeppelin. The indie world was ruled by an ever-propagating compost heap of jagged guitar bands like TFUL282, Truman’s Water, and (to crank it back a couple years) Phantom Tollbooth. And in some ways (although Orcutt swears Watt’s prime influences were James Blood Ulmer and Fred Frith’s Massacre), this record seems very much cut from that decade-ending cloth, seemingly only one vocal overdub away from a Homestead catalog number.
Track after track (mostly titled after episodes of Art Clokey’s slyly Buddhist TV masterwork, Gumby), Recorded in Miami’s tracks spill over with right angles, rockist tropes, and verse/ chorus structures, from the Minutemen-oid funk of “Band Contest” to the stroked Moore-Ranaldoisms of “The Young and the Decoding.” Yet Orcutt’s fretboard-spanning angular melodic runs are right up front in the latter, and the final two tracks introduce a bit of the explosive chaos that would follow when Adris finally claimed the drum kit. Consider “Wattstock,” where Koffley forms the bedrock for an extended Orcutt hotbox of instantly-composed harmolodics. Or “God Are You There, It’s Me, Watt,” where we can hear the spontaneous vocal bursts (the only vocals on the album) that would re-emerge on Orcutt’s early solo records.
Watt began to crumble when Koffley, as drummers will do, yearned for rhythmic grids of increasing complexity, while Orcutt instead wanted to “smoke more pot and improvise.” For a few records with Harry Pussy, Orcutt would get his wish (though some of the structuralism of Watt would creep into later records). But we shouldn’t regard Recorded in Miami as mere transitional scraps of juvenalia, or stunt-rock delivered for the mere thrill of pulling it off. Rather, it’s an early, major piece of the unfolding and complex puzzle of Orcutt’s music. A foundation. And without the earth beneath our feet, how can we ever reach the sky?“ – TOM CARTER
next month, couple shows in chicago, first ever midwest show w cracked and first ever live trio w corsano & zoh amba
It’s tempting to view guitarist Kris Gruda, a North Carolina resident, as part of a lineage of demented Southern avant-pickers stretching back to Chadbourne, and while that’s not false, it’s unnecessarily reductive. Gruda is but one particle in a contemporary wave of traveling minstrels plying the
interstates and unnumbered highways of the Deep South, navigating between pickup gigs in urban centers from Asheville to Baton Rouge to Jacksonville to Amarillo, dipping into the free jazz songbook and a bottomless bag of capital-I-improv tropes to play for audiences of 0-50 intrepid listeners (most of them musicians themselves). Against all odds (and despite dismissal by a sea of jaded music “connoisseurs” who would prefer to devour overpriced reissues than to attend actual performances), these musicians develop an evolving sonic language, unencumbered by dreams of success; nurtured by the promise of social connection, gas money, and the next bag of Beaver Nuggets.
Whether or not Gruda is one of these compulsive road-trippers is beside the point, because (as amply evidenced by his instagram account, @Grudakris) Gruda clearly spends a lot of his time in his car. Kris Gruda Plays for You was recorded entirely behind the wheel under lockdown in 2020-2021, mostly during shift breaks at the kombucha factory. Each track is a separate Instagram post, downloaded and spliced together into two unbanded sides (a la Beefheart’s Strictly Personal), and as such, represents an audio verite tour of a musical vision that, amoeba-like, engulfs two worlds separated by a windshield – the spinning car wash brushes, the passing cop cars, the preacher on the radio.
The cover (Gruda in a hairnet, oozing Waylon’s outlaw bit and clutching a stickered acoustic) supplies a little bit of the IG multimedia appeal missing from the audio, but the sound (“without which none of this is possible,” states Gruda) supplies an expansive narrative by itself. Each track, from the “Vote him Out” rap to the dual tracks of “Vehicular Sound Collage,” is a gem of creative outreach, a stab not only against the claustrophobia behind the steering wheel, but also a rebellion against the forced isolation of the lockdown itself. The politics of Plays For You are Guthrie-direct, speak to individual action, and seek to inspire us to reach beyond our silos and attempt to reconstruct a virtual solidarity we could once access via a physical commons. But I suspect what will resonate most with listeners are the plaintive cries voiced by a canny (and virtuosically played) selection of classics by Coltrane, Kirk, Coleman, and Cherry, tiny scraps that remind us of a once-encompassing musical spirituality that spurred a half-dozen would-be revolutions (and which may someday do so again). Ultimately, the enthusiasm (and massive doses of sheer weirdness) Gruda exudes in Kris Gruda Plays for You lights up a big, friendly highway into the heart of a deeply idiosyncratic and charismatic vision that’s a gas to listen to even stripped of its social media spectacle – so put down your phone and just listen. — Tom Carter
Few sounds in music are as instantly recognizable as the searching sting of guitarist Bill Orcutt and the cyclical propulsion of drummer Chris Corsano. At the same time, every single performance or recording I’ve heard by the duo has been markedly different, discovering new paths with a given set of tools. For more than a decade now they’ve been meeting up to instigate visceral sonic journeys without a map, engaging in elliptical dialogues with one another, but more often conjuring twinned excursions that occur with a kind of telepathic independence. They don’t need to plan or discuss what will happen when they get together. They simply jump in and see where things go, pushing and pulling when necessary, yet more often letting each other roam freely with the knowledge that they’ve a rapport that can weather all storms.
The performance captured on Play at Duke was taped at the von der Heyden Studio Theater in the Rubenstein Arts Center on the campus of Duke University. The set closed out a three-day festival celebrating the 21st anniversary of Three Lobed Records, and the music they made feels utterly galvanic, a fitting conclusion by turns triumphant and bloodied. The set clocks in at just under 26 minutes but there’s nothing lacking, nothing slight. The best performances fuck with time, as this sublime encounter does. The duo were in an obvious flow straight out the gate, with Orcutt unleashing fat, fragmented arpeggios that morph from anthemic chords to flickering long tones—tense moments of repose that anticipate some new digression a la Hendrix. In the first of the three “Play at Duke” the duo packs in so many discrete ideas and dialogues that it’s hard to believe they only needed eight minutes to get it done.
Orcutt and Corsano sets are thrilling, in part, because we don’t know what will happen. Will they gel, butt heads, or get cranky. The guitarist sometimes delves into his Harry Pussy roots and unleashes a post-hardcore sally to shake things up, whether it seems necessary or not, but with this particular set there’s no doubt that the pair is sync. Ideas, motifs, needling lines (shadowed, of course, by Orcutt’s wordless falsetto screamed out into the air) pile up with pure compositional logic, each new melodic theme or textural divot flowing out of the previous one with remarkable ease and fluidity. Both musicians can access all sorts of traditions at the blink of an eye. The second piece opens explosively, with Corsano delivering a singular kind of flailing energy that’s nevertheless completely liquid, while Orcutt jerks between post-no wave skree, ominously prescient chords that channel the aggression of AC/DC and Hound Dog Taylor, and upper register stabs that that both tap into some primordial wellspring of the blues and fling clusters of sound at gravity, seeking to be free of our planet’s limitations. The album’s final piece begins with repose, a breath-catching reset of contemplative tenderness that gradually opens up, the duo teetering at the edge of an explosion that never really arises, as a lyric quality manages to ride the cresting wave of energy, cutting back- and-forth into a sudden, crystal-clear denouement that feels like destiny.
