Neuguitars 2024 #3: the minimalist trance of Bill Orcutt's guitar counterpoint, “Music for four guitars”
Bill Orcutt (born February 2, 1962) is an American guitarist and composer whose work combines elements of blues, punk, and free improvisation. Inspired by seeing Muddy Waters in The Last Waltz, Orcutt began playing the guitar as a teenager in Miami. An early group, between 1989-1991, was Watt with drummer Tim Koffley. An aborted 2021 release It's All Meat comprised recordings prior to Watt with Koffley and vocalist Lloyd Johnson. Orcutt is quoted as saying this was "almost a band". In 1992, he formed the band Harry Pussy with his wife, Cuban/American drummer and vocalist Adris Hoyos. The group recorded three LPs and toured the US frequently, often in support of indie bands like Sonic Youth and Sebadoh. Their music, which drew from American no wave, hardcore punk and free jazz was influential and "served as a progenitor for the Noise movement." In 1997 the band dissolved and the couple divorced. Orcutt has issued a great many cassettes and singles in highly limited editions, usually through his labels Fake Estates and Palilalia Records. Since 2009, Orcutt has toured often appearing at festivals in the US and Europe, including Hopscotch, Incubate, Le Nouveau Festival du Centre Pompidou, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Donau and Big Ears.[14] Typically a solo performer, Orcutt has also recorded or performed with Loren Mazzacane Connors, Chris Corsano, Peter Brötzmann and Alan & Richard Bishop.
I am painfully late in reviewing this curious and interesting work by Bill Orcutt. Curious and interesting because I wouldn't have expected such a deviation from Orcutt's "usual" trajectories. In reality, this shouldn't surprise me that much: we live in a society based on the multiplicity of languages at every level, and above all in the awareness of this multiplicity. Orcutt seems to be the interpreter of this multiplicity by offering us this EP in 2022, just over thirty minutes long, which effectively manages to combine together minimalism, the raw sound of his guitars and a sort of positive musical trance.
Passing through a solo career decidedly devoted to improvisation, in this album Orcut gives us a work based on a strict and logical work's organization. With Music for Four Guitars he takes another new direction. “Music for four guitars” is music that comes out of a complex, articulated form of organization of musical work. The album's form is surprisingly minimalist: four guitars, each delivered a melody arranged in counterpoint, repeated in cells throughout the course of the track, selectively dropped in and out of the mix to build fugue-like drama. It's a tightly structured quartet for multi-tracked electric guitars that weaves tiny rhythmic phrases into expansive tapestries, drawing on the principles of early minimalism and New York guitar groups like the Glenn Branca Ensemble, and adding bluesy riffs and tense, distorted tones to the mix.
Orcutt plays all four parts of each track, and while all 14 tracks are relatively short - just two or three minutes each - they transform into intricate, brightly colored lattices, the length of which seems much longer than the actual recording 'clock. The tracks unfold in similar ways: short melodic fragments accumulate in layers to form a network of musical spiderwebs. Each track develops from a single phrase into an intertwined network where each motif is in dialogue with the others. Orcutt's structures are indebted to minimalism's interest in the way musical figures are repeated, accumulated and superimposed in a counterpoint that continually refers to the forms developed by Steve Reich and Philip Glass. In his incessant drive and emphasis on repetition, he recalls pieces like Electric Counterpoint by Steve Reich or Two Pages by Philip Glass, but charged with a kinetic and disordered energy, which leads towards a sidereal blues trance. But while this general pattern reappears in "Music for Four Guitars," it doesn't become monotonous: Orcutt instead brings a kinetic, improvisational spirit to his pieces.
In the album all four parts are played by Orcutt himself and this means that the four guitars are identical in tone and it is often impossible to distinguish the supporting structure of the melody, which flows away transforming into hypnotic music. The cumulative effect is transformative, but I found it enjoyable and fascinating to focus my attention on the moving parts, elaborate patterns, and constantly expanding and unraveling mazes. The result is a beautiful landscape of chaos, struggle and violence.
Bill Orcutt teaches us how every life is actually an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of sound objects, a collection of styles, where everything can be continuously mixed and reordered in all possible ways.