“He has an energy to him like he’s floating,” Fratti said about Orcutt when she chucked his self-titled 2017 album, his first solo electric studio jaunt, on her Baker’s Dozen list for the Quietus. She’d stumbled over the record via a blog and immediately set about following the breadcrumb trail, picking through his blues deconstructions, free jazz side-quests and his early, formative work with Adris Hoyos as Harry Pussy, one of the USA’s greatest noise duos. What happened next isn’t completely clear, but Fratti and Orcutt began communicating and, at some point, Orcutt shuttled over a pack of improvised guitar solos that lit the touch paper for the next stage. At home in Mexico City, Fratti (alongside her partner and Titanic cohort I. La Católica) retreated…
Tag Archive: Bill Orcutt
Music in Continuous Motion, Bill Orcutt’s latest entry in his 21st-century repertoire of quartet guitar music, pointedly steps away from the cut-and-paste constructivism of Music for Four Guitars into a sonic stratum that’s yearningly melodic, resolutely human, and built for performance. Conceived for a 2026 NYC concert, Music in Continuous Motion shares the concision of its predecessor – but rather than the discrete, mechanistic precision of Music for Four Guitars, the tracks on Music in Continuous Motion unify – each song weaving four gleaming threads into the warp and weft of an evolving, complex texture that employs simple, repeating motifs to build new melodies from counterpoint itself. It accomplishes this in the most efficient manner possible…
Have you been paying attention to Bill Orcutt? For the last dozen-plus years, or since the 2011 release of the splenetic acoustic marvel How the Thing Sings, the San Francisco-based guitarist has been on one of the great creative tears in his chosen instrument’s vaunted history. Whether alone, with a scattered cast of brazen collaborators, or quadrupling his own playing in an astonishing guitar quartet of one, Orcutt has been reshaping the emotional and technical terrain typically associated with instrumental guitar music. He cuts rage with wonder and laces joy with doubt as he splinters melodies and rebuilds them in uncanny new shapes, like a random-number generator that knows exactly what it’s doing. Orcutt’s music sometimes feels like some…
Bill Orcutt’s Music for Four Guitars is a bit like a favorite dish. It tasted great the first time, delicious the second, and by the third, you’re starting to realize that it’s endlessly renewable. HausLive 4, an audience recording that was taped at Chicago’s Constellation venue and released on cassette by a local label, is that illuminating third edition. Whether the guitar nerd in your life throws down with a boombox in the backyard or a Bluetooth speaker in the shower, it’s the summer party soundtrack that they might not have known that they needed. But they do.
First, some history. Orcutt arrived at the original album after several years spent trying to answer a friend’s dare to compose a guitar quartet. He eventually reached a concept:…