Bill Orcutt
Emerged as one of the most influential guitar players of the 1990s, alongside drummer Adris Hoyos in the seminal Miami-based free rock band, Harry Pussy, their half-decade existence throwing up a boutique of caustic masterpieces alongside equally luminary cohorts
Emerged as one of the most influential guitar players of the 1990s, alongside drummer Adris Hoyos in the seminal Miami-based free rock band, Harry Pussy, their half-decade existence throwing up a boutique of caustic masterpieces alongside equally luminary cohorts
Four Guitars Live
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. But while their Tiny Desk Concert gave a whiff of the quartet’s easy…
Music For Four Guitars
2023 repress. "In a trajectory full of about-faces, Music for Four Guitars splices the formal innovations of Bill Orcutt's software-based music into the lobe-frying, blown-out Fender hyperdrive of his most frenetic workouts with Corsano or Hoyos. And while the guitar tone here is resolutely treble-kicked — or, as Orcutt puts it, "a bridge pickup rather than a neck pickup record" — it still wades the same melodic streams as his previous LPs (yet, as Heraclitus taught us, that stream is utterly d…
Jump On It
2023 repress; LP version. "It's been ten years since Bill Orcutt released A History of Every One (EMEGO 173CD, 2013), a compendium of hacksaw renditions of American standards on acoustic guitar -- and since ten years is a blink of an eye, you are forgiven for not immediately realizing that we've gone an entire decade waiting for Jump On It, the next Orcutt solo acoustic record. As those of us of 'a certain age' will tell you (ad nauseam), a decade is a blink of an eye containing an infinity of e…
Play at Duke
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 excur…
The Flower School
Since exploding on the improvised music scene a couple of years ago Tennessee native Zoh Amba has found herself engaging with an ever-widening group of collaborators as she tours across the US and Europe. She's forged some enduring partnerships, working regularly with drummer Chris Corsano, bassist Thomas Morgan, and pianist Micah Thomas, among others, but one of the deep pleasures of improvised music is when a first-time meeting produces sparks. Indeed, that's certainly the case with The Flower…
Brace Up!
2023 repress. Brace Up! is the first ever studio release from the duo of Chris Corsano (drums) and Bill Orcutt (guitar). Recorded in Brussels at Les Ateliers Claus by Christophe Albertijn on March 19th and 20th, 2018. Stage dive photograph by Jason Penner. "Over the past six years or so, drummer Chris Corsano has proven to be one of Bill Orcutt's most reliably flexible collusionists. Regardless of whether Bill is cluster-busting electric guitar strings, weaseling around with cracked electronics,…
Made Out Of Sound
*2022 repress! LP version* "Sadly, many will hear Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt's latest LP, Made Out of Sound, as 'not-jazz,' though it would be more aptly described as 'not-not-jazz.' In a better world, it would warrant above-the-fold reviews in Downbeat, or an appearance on David Sanborn's late-night show (if someone would only give it back to him). More likely, we can hope for a haiku review on Byron Coley's Twitter timeline to sufficiently connect the various improvised terrains trodden by th…
Electric Guitar Duets
Limited repress, last copies! LP reissue of Land And Sea's limited 2016 tape documenting a performance by guitarists Michael Morley and Bill Orcutt at the L&S gallery in Oakland."... Once regrettable antics were permanently affixed to the rearview mirror, the pair chauffeured across the bay to Land And Sea, the cozy gallery on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland and sobered up on vegan cocktail wieners and gummie vitamins. You may doubt, you may scoff -- have fun with it, champion, seriously -- but on J…
Odds Against Tomorrow
After two albums and over half a decade spent toiling in the margins of the American Songbook, Bill Orcutt returns to original composition and the blues with his latest full-lenght, Odds Against Tomorrow. Taking its title from Robert Wise's 1959 film noir, Odds Against Tomorrow retrofits familiar folk / blues forms to the unique sound of Orcutt's guitar and the result crackles with a freshness and authority that nostalgic retreads cannot deliver. Odds Against Tomorrow is more than an expansion o…
Electric Smog
The newest installment in Unrock’s ongoing Saraswati Series is the most rebellious and wildest to date. Again an intercontinental output. A dangerous, electric brew filled with exotic aroma from Cairo’s sound guerilla, Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls), Maurice Louca (Karkhana) and Sam Shalabi (Land of Kush, Karkhana). The always changing face of Dwarfs of East Agouza, shows them in a feverish mode and adrenalin rush. Massive eruptions fight genuine flow. Sultans of Unrock. Chris Corsano and Bill Or…
Why Does Everybody Love Free Music ..
Edition of 250, few copies available. “Recorded in the US and UK 2011. Thanks to everyone who set up a show
last year, especially John Schoen, Larry Marotta, Helga Fassonaki,
Andrew Scott, Suzy Polling and Lee Etherington who made possible the
performances documented here.” Originally released on cassette in 2012
as PAL-007. Photos by R. Orcutt. "In short, almost everything you could want from a live document." Byron Coley
My Friends When I’m Not There
Edition of 250, few copies available. Recorded at Seminole Massacre Elementary, Miami FL, in the main stairwell, December 25, 2013 and originally released on cassette as PAL-028 in 2014. Photo by Jim Hensley. Mastered by James Plotkin. "A lovely contemplative performance, full of hope and sadness" Byron Coley
Bill Orcutt
LP version. For those not following Bill Orcutt's drift into increasingly ear-friendly orbits in his recent live sets, Bill Orcutt -- his first solo electric studio album -- shocks with its space and sensitivity. On this eponymous record, Orcutt mines the expansiveness and sustain possible on the electric guitar, letting notes spin out and decay at the edge of feedback. His pachinko-parlor pacing, marked by unraveling clockspring accelerandos crashing into unexpectedly suspended tones, is s…
Live At Various / Various Live
That guitarist Bill Orcutt & drummer Chris Corsano would play as a duo should come as a surprise to no one. As artists, both of them have bent sonic boundaries to the breaking point, especially as regards rock-based music, and they have long flowed through the same international sub-underground arteries. It was only a matter of time. The first fruit of their union was a brain melting LP called The Raw & The Cooked (2013), recorded on tour in 2012. Live at Various / Various Live is made up o…
Live at Cafe Oto
The full recording of the first meeting between Bill Orcutt (USA) and Okkyung Lee (South Korea). Individually these players have focused on an idiosyncratic approach to their chosen instruments and technique. Okkyung is one of the most singular voices to compromise the cello's classical origin, while Orcutt has spent many years developing a unique abstraction of traditional guitar blues. Live at Cafe OTO is an uncompromising combination of these individual elements and an ecstatic improvised ass…
Colonial Donuts
LP edition. Guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer Jacob Felix Heule (Ettrick, Fred Frith, Sult) have been performing regularly around the San Francisco Bay Area since 2012, but this is their first release together. Recorded in Orcutt's living room in the early months of 2015 and named after a chain of Oakland coffee shops, Colonial Donuts collects 13 compact, stylistically diverse duets for electric guitar and drums, ranging from hushed, socially anxious folk to sprung electric blues to dense,…
Road Stories (Kali)
The first installment in Unrock's new string wringer Saraswati Series presents two of today's most extraordinary guitar maniacs captured on location. While Bill Orcutt, "Re-inventor of the Blues," falls from abstraction into acoustic hardcore serenade on his wooden 4-string guitar, the Kali-inspired Sir Richard Bishop improvises elegantly and calmly through a feverish 17-minute variation of "Zurvan." Limited edition of 700 numbered copies. 180 gram vinyl, ncludes a solid cardboard info s…
Square Cunts s/t New Remorse
In a blender, stuck with your hand, while a heavy wooden table leans on your chest, yelling "keep it down and help, or at least unplug the blender and take that table away", while in the other room the whole family is dancing to "Square Cunts", the automatic acoustic guitar boomerang on the A side of this single, it took a swing in the kitchen and just flew back into the other room! Flipped around, the kitchen dried out when uncle Bill reads his stolen poetry!
Solo Acoustic Volume Ten
Guitarist Bill Orcutt's fist set of new compositions in many years is a series of abstract blues played on the acoustic guitar, using a variety of tunings, and referencing great historical blues players alongside unusual historical errata."It's been two decades since Bill Orcutt was part of Harry Pussy, Miami's most bracing, uncompromising ensemble of noisemakers. After taking almost 15 years away from music following the demise of HP, he returned in 2009 -- with the fantastic A New Way to Pay O…
A history of every one
'A History of Every One' by Bill Orcutt is an album of songs: minstrel songs, holiday songs, hymns, marches, cowboy songs, Disney songs, work songs, delta blues. The original tunes themselves are nothing special, well known, but not particularly well-regarded. Most would be filler on a mid-60's Doris Day or Burl Ives LP. What Orcutt does with them however is remarkable: expanding upon techniques developed on 2011's 'How the Thing Sings' and incorporating ideasforged since his recording of 'The S…