★Palilalia Records
Kris Gruda Plays for You
"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 an…
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…
You'll Never Come Back
Reissue of Harry Pussy's Ride A Dove, originally released on Siltbreeze in 1996. "By 1996, with one LP, a handful of 7"s, and a couple dozen gigs under their collective belts, Harry Pussy had thoroughly scrambled the mid-90s scuzz-rock ecosystem. Their acclaimed first LP, described by David Keenan as 'a black hole that devoured genre and flattened any attempt to classify it,' fused Japanese noise, '80s hardcore and post-Ayler jazz into a dense, white-hot ball of punk anger and insanity. The band…