Palilalia Records

“Way Down South” reviewed in November’s Wire

The re-emergence of the ex-Harry Pussy guitarist as an acoustic player is perhaps the most unlooked-for development of the last several years. He creates a unique vocabulary by the same means as he did in the electric context of his previous group – minimal stringing. I have never seen him play a guitar with more than four strings. This speaks volumes both for Orcutt’s understanding of his instrument (a vintage Kay acoustic) and his deep understanding of his chosen tradition. Having witnessed the concert documented on this single-sided LP at the High St Project space in Christchurch, New Zealand, I can confirm that he is both a consummate instrumentalist and a hell of a performer. 

Compared to his album A New Way To Pay Old Debts,the sound is softer and less close-miked, but his playing is surer and more developed in its voice. Orcutt references an eclectic bunch of American touchstones such as the Dagget St recordings of Loren Connors, Lightning Hopkins and John Fahey, but his harmonic intuition and woodcutting approach to playing (his guitar is the timber, his hand the axe), stakes him out a territory that is all his own. The thrashing of the open strings in the closing cut reveals harmonic overtones that echo pipe organ music, and demonstrate that Orcutt’s primary engagement is with sounds in acoustic space, no matter what kind of guitar he’s playing. 

Lester Bangs in his epochal review of Fun House told a story about Cecil Taylor playing with a bass player who had no conventional musical training, but who was creating a new vocabulary from the ground up. In the context of the new tradition which he sensed starting from that album, Bangs described “something…beginning to take shape which, though erratic, was unique in all this world”. 40 years later we can hear what he foresaw in sides like this being cut by someone from a generation whose understanding of music is emphatically post-Stooges. This is acoustic music that paradoxically references both the skronk of rock and the freedom of jazz, without losing touch with its roots in the blues. It’s fair to say that what Orcutt is doing here is indeed something unique in all this world. Bruce Russell 

“A New Way” Reviewed in November’s Wire

They may seem poles apart, but the guitar deconstructions of former Harry Pussy member Bill Orcutt on “A New Way To Pay Old Debts” place him alongside the likes of John Fahey. During the latter years of his life, Fahey deliberately turned his back on his earlier fingerpicking style to explore other ways of how to play solo guitar. To do this he allowed himself to slip into a state of altered consciousness - his fingers instinctively found the notes on the fretboard, but his imagination was unleashed from the routine of chord changing to discover new sounds. Meanwhile Orcutt, on “A New Way To Pay Old Debts”, has absorbed himself in the work of blues legends “Mississippi” Fred McDowell and Lightnin’ Hopkins, flamenco guitarist Ramon Montoya, Bahamian guitar master Joseph Spence and British improvisor Derek Bailey, whose influence echoes loudest here, and crashes these styles together with such enefgy that his guitar sounds in danger of splintering into matchwood.

Orcutt emerged from the ripped and torn environs of the early 1990’s US punk rock/hardcore scene as the guitarist for Harry Pussy, the group he co-founded in 1992 in Miami, Florida with Adris Hoyos on drums and vocals and himself on guitar. Up until their demise in 1997, Harry Pussy performed and recorded an extreme version of hardcore that was stripped bare of melody, rhythm or chorus, leaving only the aftershock of Hoyos’s piercing vocal and Orcutt’s tangle of broken guitar music dangling dangerously in the air.

Before ending the group, Orcutt and Hoyos collaborated on “Let’s Build A Pussy”, an obscure double LP that was constructed from a single one second recording of Hoyos screaming that Orcutt - credited as playing “mouse” - had digitally stretched out to fill all four sides of the album. Described by one disgruntled reviewer as “a kiss goodbye turned into a very gradually uncurled middle finger”. the bulk of Harry Pussy’s fanbase regarded it as something intended to confound and snub any feelings of loyalty they might have felt towards th group, in a similar way that many of Fahey’s early admirers fit distanced by his conversion to improvisation and Noise on albums such as “Womblife” and “City Of Refuge”. By daring to transplant the root of Harry Pussy’s sound (Hoyos’s vocal) and place it in a different area of music (minimalism). Orcutt had laid to rest the bones of his old group.

Any attempt by Orcutt to completely exorcise the spectre of Harry Pussy from his latest work - for solo acoustic guitar - has been only partly successful, however. While continuing the confrontational and experimental trajectory of their swansong, the minimalist curve of that final work has been replaced with a frenzied maximalism that admirers of the group will surely relate to - except that his playing on “A New Way To Puy Old Debts” sounds like no other guitar sound you`ve ever heard in your life.

Orcutt is playing a vintage acoustic Kay guitar equipped with a DeArmond pickup that he bought on the street in Gainesville, Florida, where he want to university. After the neck was broken and subsequently repaired, the guitar was downtuned so as to withstand the tension of the strings, and played with the A and D strings removed - something the guitarist has done since the 1985. Rippling with short bursts of snagging chords and skittenng notes, songs such as “My Reckless Parts”, “Sad News From Korea” and the title track have a life of their own, as Orcutt struggles to control the gush of notes and dislocated rhythm that flows from his fingers. Not every track is composed this way, however - on “Cold Ground“ the pace is less frantic and more subdued, with the guitar sections spaced apart to allow an uneasy, funereal calm.

Cecil Taylor and Canadian classical pianist Glenn Gould were also musical touchstones in the creation of A New Way. and there is a distinct keyboard element to Orcutt’s style that mirrors the precise methods of both players, as well as the player-piano compositions of Conlon Nancarrow, The influence can be plainly heard midway through “Lip Rich”. where the reverberating guitar strings against the pickup are strained to the point where they sound like TayIor’s stabbed piano keys. Orcutt adds his own voice to the mix, and his rough hollering, along with the interruption of a phone ringing and the noise of traffic outside, brings a sense of place tothe recording.

Including his voice in this way. Orcutt pays tribute to Gould who, as instructed by his music tutor mother, would sang the notes to Bach’s Goldberg Variations as he played them. Gould also decreed that “no piano need feel duty-bound to always sound like a piano”. By the way he reinvents his guitar playing here, just as Fahey reinvented his own before, Orcutt has surely taken such a dictum to heart.

Edwin Pouncey in Wire #309, November 2009