PALILALIA - Forced Exposure

$16.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 12/6/2024

"Ava Mendoza has never made an album quite as personal as her second solo full-length, The Circular Train. Through her decades of collaborations with Nels Cline, Carla Bozulich, William Parker, Fred Frith, Matana Roberts, and Mick Barr -- plus years leading her power trio Unnatural Ways and playing in Bill Orcutt's quartet -- the guitarist's name has become synonymous with virtuoso technique, raw passion, and visceral resonance, a player pushing the edges of the guitar's possibilities. Along the way, from 2007 to 2023, Mendoza was writing these slow-burning, incandescent songs. The Circular Train is comprised solely of her single-tracked guitar playing and, on two songs, her corporeal singing. Her first solo LP of original material since relocating from California to New York City a decade ago, much of The Circular Train was honed amid pandemic years that clarified the virtues of slowing down. This expressive avant-rock is a definitive introduction to one of the most uncompromising and inquisitive visions in creative music. Mendoza's thrilling melange of free jazz, blues, noise, classical training, and blazing experimental rock'n'roll all coheres with ecstatic feedback, with picking and solos that crest with shimmer. Sometimes she sounds like a one-woman Sonic Youth with guttural and poised vocals that equally evoke Patti Smith and blues greats like Jessie Mae Hemphill.

$26.00 IN STOCK

LP version. "Ava Mendoza has never made an album quite as personal as her second solo full-length, The Circular Train. Through her decades of collaborations with Nels Cline, Carla Bozulich, William Parker, Fred Frith, Matana Roberts, and Mick Barr -- plus years leading her power trio Unnatural Ways and playing in Bill Orcutt's quartet -- the guitarist's name has become synonymous with virtuoso technique, raw passion, and visceral resonance, a player pushing the edges of the guitar's possibilities. Along the way, from 2007 to 2023, Mendoza was writing these slow-burning, incandescent songs. The Circular Train is comprised solely of her single-tracked guitar playing and, on two songs, her corporeal singing. Her first solo LP of original material since relocating from California to New York City a decade ago, much of The Circular Train was honed amid pandemic years that clarified the virtues of slowing down. This expressive avant-rock is a definitive introduction to one of the most uncompromising and inquisitive visions in creative music. Mendoza's thrilling melange of free jazz, blues, noise, classical training, and blazing experimental rock'n'roll all coheres with ecstatic feedback, with picking and solos that crest with shimmer. Sometimes she sounds like a one-woman Sonic Youth with guttural and poised vocals that equally evoke Patti Smith and blues greats like Jessie Mae Hemphill.

$22.00 IN STOCK

"I was hanging out with Bill Orcutt at the 930 Club nearly 30 years ago, watching a famous post-rock band (who shall remain nameless, but whose moniker contained two-and-a-half times more articles and conjunctions than nouns) when he said: 'This band is like my band in college -- all major 7th and 9th chords.' I relate this to emphasize that in the case of Bill Orcutt and Harry Pussy, the seemingly untutored ooze of 'Please Don't Come Back From the Moon' and 'Girl With Frog' had its genesis in something far more Apollonian than is usually understood. It's debatable whether or not Watt, the duo of Orcutt and drummer Tim Koffley featured on Recorded in Miami, is the above referenced grad-school band. Watt is not resplendent with jazz chords, but it's certainly more tutored, offering a mannered link between the contemporaneous Thunders-esque punk of Orcutt's Trash Monkeys and Harry Pussy's mayhem. The continuity with Harry Pussy is more than temporal -- Recorded in Miami is Orcutt's first use of the four-string guitar, and Harry Pussy claimed the same amp and drum kit. The resemblance more or less ends there. To further put Recorded in Miami -- made on Orcutt's Walkman, Rat Bastard's North Miami studio, and South Miami's Natural Sound (total bill $289) -- into context, consider the fecundity of the underground music world as the '80s rolled into the '90s. It's hard to relate to those who missed it, but it was a time when post-hardcore hadn't quite given way to the bloat of grunge, when the Minutemen held sway (for the moment) over Led Zeppelin. The indie world was ruled by an ever-propagating compost heap of jagged guitar bands like TFUL282, Truman's Water, and (to crank it back a couple years) Phantom Tollbooth. And in some ways (although Orcutt swears Watt's prime influences were James Blood Ulmer and Fred Frith's Massacre), this record seems very much cut from that decade-ending cloth, seemingly only one vocal overdub away from a Homestead catalog number. Track after track (mostly titled after episodes of Art Clokey's slyly Buddhist TV masterwork, Gumby), Recorded in Miami's tracks spill over with right angles, rockist tropes, and verse/ chorus structures, from the Minutemen-oid funk of 'Band Contest' to the stroked Moore-Ranaldo-isms of 'The Young and the Decoding.' Yet Orcutt's fretboard-spanning angular melodic runs are right up front in the latter, and the final two tracks introduce a bit of the explosive chaos that would follow when Adris finally claimed the drum kit. Consider 'Wattstock,' where Koffley forms the bedrock for an extended Orcutt hotbox of instantly-composed harmolodics. Or 'God Are You There, It's Me, Watt,' where we can hear the spontaneous vocal bursts (the only vocals on the album) that would re-emerge on Orcutt's early solo records. Watt began to crumble when Koffley, as drummers will do, yearned for rhythmic grids of increasing complexity, while Orcutt instead wanted to 'smoke more pot and improvise.' For a few records with Harry Pussy, Orcutt would get his wish (though some of the structuralism of Watt would creep into later records). But we shouldn't regard Recorded in Miami as mere transitional scraps of juvenalia, or stunt-rock delivered for the mere thrill of pulling it off. Rather, it's an early, major piece of the unfolding and complex puzzle of Orcutt's music. A foundation. And without the earth beneath our feet, how can we ever reach the sky?" --Tom Carter

$15.00 IN STOCK

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 School, which bottles some serious lightning. In March of 2023, Amba and Corsano had finished up a duo tour of the west coast with an explosive performance in San Francisco. The next day the duo entered the studio with guitarist Bill Orcutt -- a trusted collaborator of the drummer stretching back a decade. It was the first time Orcutt and Amba had ever played together, but it sure doesn't seem that way. Although Amba has often recorded a bunch of tune-oriented albums for Tzadik, she's a free improviser at heart, and this trio arguably provides the most effective, elastic context for her playing yet. Yet what's most astonishing about The Flower School is how it elevates and transforms the playing of all three participants. It appears that there was more than enough trust in the room to allow each player to push-and-pull. Anyone who pays attention already knows that Orcutt and Corsano are mercurial figures, perpetually adapting, adjusting, and challenging one another. Inviting a third person to the party could threaten a slowly cultivated balance, but in this case the addition only heightened various dichotomies: soft vs. loud, bruising vs. tender, furious vs. lyric. Much has been made of Amba's debt to the free jazz of 1960s, particularly the way her vibrato-drenched tone dips into valley of sacred music, but here she carves out a space that's entirely hers. On tracks like "The Morning Light Has Flooded My Eyes" and "What Emptiness Do You Gaze Upon!" she reveals a meticulously sharpened gift for motific improvisation, taking a single phrase and chiseling away it until she's discovered every possible permutation, all the while driven by the feverish energy and empathy of her cohorts. This group also displays Orcutt's masterful support skills, as he often takes a single chord or two, letting them float in mutate in the background or splintering them into patient, reserved arpeggios that ripple alongside Corsano's circular sculptures and the saxophonist's edgy blowing. Two of the album's five tracks are duets between Orcutt and Amba. The collection is bisected by "Sweet One," a delicate lattice formed by Orcutt's tremulous electric guitar arpeggios and Amba's spike acoustic pointillism that basks in its own leisurely beauty for a couple of restorative minutes, while the album closer "Moon Showed But No You" is a searingly beautiful ballad where the guitarist unspools clusters of notes somewhere between vintage Loren Mazzacane Connor and a distorted kalimba, while Amba puts an upwardly arcing melodic line through its paces, finding new wrinkles at every turn.

$18.50 IN STOCK

"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 and a bottomless bag of capital-I-improv tropes to play for audiences of 0-50 intrepid listeners (most of them musicians themselves) .... Whether or not Gruda is one of these compulsive road-trippers is beside the point, because... Gruda clearly spends a lot of his time in his car. Kris Gruda Plays for You was recorded entirely behind the wheel under lockdown in 2020-2021, mostly during shift breaks at the kombucha factory. Each track is a separate Instagram post, downloaded and spliced together into two unbanded sides (a la Beefheart's Strictly Personal), and as such, represents an audio verite tour of a musical vision that, amoeba-like, engulfs two worlds separated by a windshield -- the spinning car wash brushes, the passing cop cars, the preacher on the radio. The cover (Gruda in a hairnet, oozing Waylon's outlaw bit and clutching a stickered acoustic) supplies a little bit of the IG multimedia appeal missing from the audio, but the sound ("without which none of this is possible," states Gruda) supplies an expansive narrative by itself.... The politics of Plays For You are Guthrie-direct, speak to individual action, and seek to inspire us to reach beyond our silos and attempt to reconstruct a virtual solidarity we could once access via a physical commons. But I suspect what will resonate most with listeners are the plaintive cries voiced by a canny (and virtuosically played) selection of classics by Coltrane, Kirk, Coleman, and Cherry, tiny scraps that remind us of a once-encompassing musical spirituality that spurred a half-dozen would-be revolutions (and which may someday do so again). Ultimately, the enthusiasm (and massive doses of sheer weirdness) Gruda exudes in Kris Gruda Plays for You lights up a big, friendly highway into the heart of a deeply idiosyncratic and charismatic vision that's a gas to listen to even stripped of its social media spectacle -- so put down your phone and just listen." --Tom Carter, 2023

$22.00 NOT IN STOCK

[sold out] "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 excursions that occur with a kind of telepathic independence. They don't need to plan or discuss what will happen when they get together. They simply jump in and see where things go, pushing and pulling when necessary, yet more often letting each other roam freely with the knowledge that they've a rapport that can weather all storms. The performance captured on Play at Duke was taped at the von der Heyden Studio Theater in the Rubenstein Arts Center on the campus of Duke University. The set closed out a three-day festival celebrating the 21st anniversary of Three Lobed Records, and the music they made feels utterly galvanic, a fitting conclusion by turns triumphant and bloodied. The set clocks in at just under 26 minutes but there's nothing lacking, nothing slight. The best performances fuck with time, as this sublime encounter does. The duo was in an obvious flow straight out the gate, with Orcutt unleashing fat, fragmented arpeggios that morph from anthemic chords to flickering long tones -- tense moments of repose that anticipate some new digression a la Hendrix. In the first of the three 'Play at Duke' the duo packs in so many discrete ideas and dialogues that it's hard to believe they only needed eight minutes to get it done. Orcutt and Corsano sets are thrilling, in part, because we don't know what will happen. Will they gel, butt heads, or get cranky. The guitarist sometimes delves into his Harry Pussy roots and unleashes a post-hardcore sally to shake things up, whether it seems necessary or not, but with this particular set there's no doubt that the pair is sync. Ideas, motifs, needling lines (shadowed, of course, by Orcutt's wordless falsetto screamed out into the air) pile up with pure compositional logic, each new melodic theme or textural divot flowing out of the previous one with remarkable ease and fluidity. Both musicians can access all sorts of traditions at the blink of an eye. The second piece opens explosively, with Corsano delivering a singular kind of flailing energy that's nevertheless completely liquid, while Orcutt jerks between post-no wave skree, ominously prescient chords that channel the aggression of AC/DC and Hound Dog Taylor, and upper register stabs that that both tap into some primordial wellspring of the blues and fling clusters of sound at gravity, seeking to be free of our planet's limitations. The album's final piece begins with repose, a breath-catching reset of contemplative tenderness that gradually opens up, the duo teetering at the edge of an explosion that never really arises, as a lyric quality manages to ride the cresting wave of energy, cutting back-and-forth into a sudden, crystal-clear denouement that feels like destiny."

$22.00 NOT IN STOCK

2023 repress. 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 School, which bottles some serious lightning. In March of 2023, Amba and Corsano had finished up a duo tour of the west coast with an explosive performance in San Francisco. The next day the duo entered the studio with guitarist Bill Orcutt -- a trusted collaborator of the drummer stretching back a decade. It was the first time Orcutt and Amba had ever played together, but it sure doesn't seem that way. Although Amba has often recorded a bunch of tune-oriented albums for Tzadik, she's a free improviser at heart, and this trio arguably provides the most effective, elastic context for her playing yet. Yet what's most astonishing about The Flower School is how it elevates and transforms the playing of all three participants. It appears that there was more than enough trust in the room to allow each player to push-and-pull. Anyone who pays attention already knows that Orcutt and Corsano are mercurial figures, perpetually adapting, adjusting, and challenging one another. Inviting a third person to the party could threaten a slowly cultivated balance, but in this case the addition only heightened various dichotomies: soft vs. loud, bruising vs. tender, furious vs. lyric. Much has been made of Amba's debt to the free jazz of 1960s, particularly the way her vibrato-drenched tone dips into valley of sacred music, but here she carves out a space that's entirely hers. On tracks like "The Morning Light Has Flooded My Eyes" and "What Emptiness Do You Gaze Upon!" she reveals a meticulously sharpened gift for motific improvisation, taking a single phrase and chiseling away it until she's discovered every possible permutation, all the while driven by the feverish energy and empathy of her cohorts. This group also displays Orcutt's masterful support skills, as he often takes a single chord or two, letting them float in mutate in the background or splintering them into patient, reserved arpeggios that ripple alongside Corsano's circular sculptures and the saxophonist's edgy blowing. Two of the album's five tracks are duets between Orcutt and Amba. The collection is bisected by "Sweet One," a delicate lattice formed by Orcutt's tremulous electric guitar arpeggios and Amba's spike acoustic pointillism that basks in its own leisurely beauty for a couple of restorative minutes, while the album closer "Moon Showed But No You" is a searingly beautiful ballad where the guitarist unspools clusters of notes somewhere between vintage Loren Mazzacane Connor and a distorted kalimba, while Amba puts an upwardly arcing melodic line through its paces, finding new wrinkles at every turn.

$13.50 IN STOCK

"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 experiential moments, and if this record is any gauge, the weight of those experiences have squashed Orcutt's rough edges, feathered his stop-motion timing into a languid lyrical flow, and snapped the shackles tethering his instant compositional skills to the imperative to deconstruct guitar history. In short, Jump On It is a collection of canonical, mature acoustic guitar soli to contrast against the fractured downtown conceits of previous acoustic releases. For those paying attention to the arc of Orcutt's electric records, which chart a course from Quine's choppiness to Thompsonian/Verlaine-ian flow, it should be no surprise that the ten-year gap between acoustic records should expose a similar underlying journey. But what's maybe more surprising is that Jump On It, with its living-room aesthetics and big reverb, packs a disarming intimacy absent from the formal starkness of Orcutt's earlier acoustic outings. Although you might sense the looming human in the audible breath whispering intermittently between chords (a physical flourish reminiscent of the late Jack Rose), such documentarian signposts are the exception rather than the rule. Not quite refuting (yet not quite embracing) the polish of revered watershed records by Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, or Bola Sete, Jump On It treads a path between the raw and the refined, exemplified in tracks such as 'The Life of Jesus' and 'In a Column of Air' that alternate swaying chords with Orcutt's trademark angular quicksilver runs (cut brickwall short). While you won't mistake Jump On It for incidental music, at least not if taken at full strength, stray passages radiate a conversational beauty that would please the most dissonance-adverse listener. Strangely, some of the melted lockstep grooves found in Jump On It evoke nothing other than Music for Four Guitars (PAL 068CD/LP). While many of the linear runs are clearly improvised, and the phrasing distinctly slurred, intuitive and non-mechanical, the strummed chords hint at a cellular construction similar to Jump On It's electric predecessor. (Orcutt states that he prefers to keep his strategies obscure -- but that implies there is in fact a strategy). Whatever the case, I also hear Satie in Music for Four Guitars, and I hear him here too, hidden within Jump On It's lilting repetition, which I easily imagine stretching to an infinitely-distant horizon. Like each of Satie's three Gymnopedies, each facet of Jump On It is a tiny miniature bound in a slim volume, an earworm you might savor again and again upon awakening or before drifting off. Each track is a key to a memory, a building block in a shining anamnesis leading to the recollection that hey, we're all humans in a shared cosmos, and music is one way we might make that universe go down easy. And who wouldn't jump on that?" --Tom Carter Recorded Spring/Summer 2022 at the Living Room, San Francisco. Mixed and mastered by Chuck Johnson.

$22.00 NOT IN STOCK

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 experiential moments, and if this record is any gauge, the weight of those experiences have squashed Orcutt's rough edges, feathered his stop-motion timing into a languid lyrical flow, and snapped the shackles tethering his instant compositional skills to the imperative to deconstruct guitar history. In short, Jump On It is a collection of canonical, mature acoustic guitar soli to contrast against the fractured downtown conceits of previous acoustic releases. For those paying attention to the arc of Orcutt's electric records, which chart a course from Quine's choppiness to Thompsonian/Verlaine-ian flow, it should be no surprise that the ten-year gap between acoustic records should expose a similar underlying journey. But what's maybe more surprising is that Jump On It, with its living-room aesthetics and big reverb, packs a disarming intimacy absent from the formal starkness of Orcutt's earlier acoustic outings. Although you might sense the looming human in the audible breath whispering intermittently between chords (a physical flourish reminiscent of the late Jack Rose), such documentarian signposts are the exception rather than the rule. Not quite refuting (yet not quite embracing) the polish of revered watershed records by Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, or Bola Sete, Jump On It treads a path between the raw and the refined, exemplified in tracks such as 'The Life of Jesus' and 'In a Column of Air' that alternate swaying chords with Orcutt's trademark angular quicksilver runs (cut brickwall short). While you won't mistake Jump On It for incidental music, at least not if taken at full strength, stray passages radiate a conversational beauty that would please the most dissonance-adverse listener. Strangely, some of the melted lockstep grooves found in Jump On It evoke nothing other than Music for Four Guitars (PAL 068CD/LP). While many of the linear runs are clearly improvised, and the phrasing distinctly slurred, intuitive and non-mechanical, the strummed chords hint at a cellular construction similar to Jump On It's electric predecessor. (Orcutt states that he prefers to keep his strategies obscure -- but that implies there is in fact a strategy). Whatever the case, I also hear Satie in Music for Four Guitars, and I hear him here too, hidden within Jump On It's lilting repetition, which I easily imagine stretching to an infinitely-distant horizon. Like each of Satie's three Gymnopedies, each facet of Jump On It is a tiny miniature bound in a slim volume, an earworm you might savor again and again upon awakening or before drifting off. Each track is a key to a memory, a building block in a shining anamnesis leading to the recollection that hey, we're all humans in a shared cosmos, and music is one way we might make that universe go down easy. And who wouldn't jump on that?" --Tom Carter Recorded Spring/Summer 2022 at the Living Room, San Francisco. Mixed and mastered by Chuck Johnson.

$15.00 LOW STOCK LEVEL

"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 different the second time around). Although it's a true left-field listen, Music for Four Guitars is bizarrely meditative, a Bill Orcutt Buddha Machine, a glimpse of the world of icy beauty haunting the latitudes high above the Delta (down where the climate suits your clothes). I've written before of the immediate misapprehension that greeted Harry Pussy on their first tour with my band Charalambides -- that this was a trio of crazed freaks spontaneously spewing sound from wherever their fingers or drumsticks happened to land -- but I'll grant the casual listener a certain amount of confusion based on the early recorded evidence (and the fact that the band COULD be a trio of crazed freaks letting fly, as we learned from later tours). But to my ears, the precision and composition of their tracks were immediately apparent, as if the band was some sort of 5-D music box with its handle cranked into oblivion by a calculating organ grinder, running through musical maps as pre-ordained as the road to a Calvinist's grave. That organ grinder, it turns out, was Bill Orcutt, whose solo guitar output until 2022 has tilted decidedly towards improvisation, while his fetish for relentless, gridlike composition has animated his electronic music (c.f. Live in LA, A Mechanical Joey). Music for Four Guitars, apparently percolating since 2015 as a loosely-conceived score for an actual meatspace guitar quartet, is the culmination of years ruminating on classical music, Magic Band miniatures, and (perhaps) The League of Crafty Guitarists, although when the Reich-isms got tossed in the brew is anyone's guess. And Reichian (Steve, not Wilhelm) it is. The album's form is startlingly minimalist -- four guitars, each consigned to a chattering melody in counterpoint, repeated in cells throughout the course of the track, selectively pulled in and out of the mix to build fugue-like drama over the course of 14 brief tracks. It's tempting to compare them to chamber music, but these pieces reflect little of the delicacy of Satie's Gymnopedies or Bach's Cantatas. Instead, they bulldoze their way through melodic content with a touch of the motorik romanticism of New Order or Bailter Space ('At a Distance'), but more often ('A Different View,' 'On the Horizon') with the gonad-crushing drive of Discipline-era Crimson, full of squared corners, coldly angled like Beefheart-via-Beat-Detective. Just to nail down the classical fetishism, the album features a download of an 80-page PDF score transcribed by guitarist Shane Parish. And while it'd be just as reproducible as a bit of code or a player piano roll, I can easily close my eyes and imagine folks with brows higher than mine squeezing into their difficult-listening hour folding chairs at Issue Project Room to soak up these sounds being played by real people reading a printed score 50 years from now. And as much as I want to bomb anyone's academy, that feels like a warm fuzzy future to sink into." --Tom Carter Recorded Winter/Spring 2021 at the Living Room, San Francisco. Mastered by James Plotkin.

$22.00 NOT IN STOCK

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 different the second time around). Although it's a true left-field listen, Music for Four Guitars is bizarrely meditative, a Bill Orcutt Buddha Machine, a glimpse of the world of icy beauty haunting the latitudes high above the Delta (down where the climate suits your clothes). I've written before of the immediate misapprehension that greeted Harry Pussy on their first tour with my band Charalambides -- that this was a trio of crazed freaks spontaneously spewing sound from wherever their fingers or drumsticks happened to land -- but I'll grant the casual listener a certain amount of confusion based on the early recorded evidence (and the fact that the band COULD be a trio of crazed freaks letting fly, as we learned from later tours). But to my ears, the precision and composition of their tracks were immediately apparent, as if the band was some sort of 5-D music box with its handle cranked into oblivion by a calculating organ grinder, running through musical maps as pre-ordained as the road to a Calvinist's grave. That organ grinder, it turns out, was Bill Orcutt, whose solo guitar output until 2022 has tilted decidedly towards improvisation, while his fetish for relentless, gridlike composition has animated his electronic music (c.f. Live in LA, A Mechanical Joey). Music for Four Guitars, apparently percolating since 2015 as a loosely-conceived score for an actual meatspace guitar quartet, is the culmination of years ruminating on classical music, Magic Band miniatures, and (perhaps) The League of Crafty Guitarists, although when the Reich-isms got tossed in the brew is anyone's guess. And Reichian (Steve, not Wilhelm) it is. The album's form is startlingly minimalist -- four guitars, each consigned to a chattering melody in counterpoint, repeated in cells throughout the course of the track, selectively pulled in and out of the mix to build fugue-like drama over the course of 14 brief tracks. It's tempting to compare them to chamber music, but these pieces reflect little of the delicacy of Satie's Gymnopedies or Bach's Cantatas. Instead, they bulldoze their way through melodic content with a touch of the motorik romanticism of New Order or Bailter Space ('At a Distance'), but more often ('A Different View,' 'On the Horizon') with the gonad-crushing drive of Discipline-era Crimson, full of squared corners, coldly angled like Beefheart-via-Beat-Detective. Just to nail down the classical fetishism, the album features a download of an 80-page PDF score transcribed by guitarist Shane Parish. And while it'd be just as reproducible as a bit of code or a player piano roll, I can easily close my eyes and imagine folks with brows higher than mine squeezing into their difficult-listening hour folding chairs at Issue Project Room to soak up these sounds being played by real people reading a printed score 50 years from now. And as much as I want to bomb anyone's academy, that feels like a warm fuzzy future to sink into." --Tom Carter Recorded Winter/Spring 2021 at the Living Room, San Francisco. Mastered by James Plotkin.

$32.00 IN STOCK

2023 repress. Limited double-LP version of the 2008 CD originally issued on Load, compiling the best live and studio recordings by the final iteration of this group.

"60 second bursts of chaotic rock 'n' roll that barbarize whole histories of freakout style, from free jazz through classic hardcore, boogie, blues, Black Flag, Germs, most explicitly through Beefheart, but all hyper-condensed into ultra-kranky riffs that Orcutt plays at hallucinatory speed, compressing Zoot Horn Rollo style avant confusion into lighting runs and metallic two note knock-outs. Hoyos's style is so primitive that it's wildly avantgarde, with an instinctive feel for time that confounds the most advanced improvisatory strategies with the most hysterical. And her vocals are post-Yoko in the truest sense, not directly informed by her but sharing the same spontaneous energy and a-musical appeal, sometimes breaking from songs completely to expand on barely articulated vocal rants and fever pitched bouts of screaming. The whole group existed in a zone that was constantly beyond technique. The arc of their career was perfect, the mission truly accomplished, and all that's left is this amazing series of recordings, a body of work that has had a disproportionate effect on the minds, if rarely the actual sound of the underground." --David Keenan, The Wire, December 2008

$22.00 NOT IN STOCK

"Somewhere between the first and second Harry Pussy singles, Adris and I worked up a set's worth of 30-second 'songs.' I doubt we ever played the whole thing live, but we did record it over a couple of nights at Rat's studio around the corner from our Michigan Ave apartment on Miami Beach. Our occasional bandmate, Ian Steinberg, a teenage accordionist whose mom dropped him off for the session, showed up on the second night to contribute vocals and fuzz accordion on several tracks. Of all the songs recorded, only 'HP Superstar' was ever released, on 1995's What Was Music? compilation, though 'No Hey', 'Youth Problem' and 'Prelude' appeared in other versions elsewhere. Live renditions of some of this set are also captured on the 'Live in Chapel Hill, 1993' single." --Bill Orcutt

"Almost as if The Germs had the diligence of Minutemen. Sounds like a crazy idea, but this record is nuts!" --Byron Coley

Adris Hoyos: drums & vox; Bill Orcutt: guitar & vox; Ian Steinberg: accordion & vox (1-21, 31-32) 1-21 recorded at Sync Studios, Miami Beach 1993 by Rat Bastard. 22-29 recorded live in Chapel Hill, NC, 1993. 30-33 recorded in rehearsal at the Alliance Cinema, Miami Beach. Some tracks previously released on Superstar 7", Live in Chapel Hill 7", and What Was Music? CD (Siltbreeze). Expanded 12" gatefold LP version of the last year's surprise hit EP -- 33 songs, includes ten unreleased tracks, live versions, rehearsal recordings, cover songs, accordion mixes, extended edits and studio outtakes.

$18.50 NOT IN STOCK

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 this long-time duo -- but if you've been able to listen past the overmodulated icepick fidelity of Harry Pussy, it should surprise you not an iota that Orcutt's style is rooted as much in the fractal melodies of Trane and Taylor as it is in Delta syrup or Tin Pan Alley glitz. As for Corsano, well, it may seem daft to call this particular record 'jazz' (because duh, it has a drummer), but to me Corsano is beyond jazz, almost beyond music, his ambidextrous, octopoid technique grappling many stylistic levers and spraying a torrent of light from every direction. Corsano's ferocity has elevated many 'mere' improv records to transcendence, but here he's crafted his polyrhythms within more narrative channels, bringing to mind his 'mannered' playing in the lamented Flower-Corsano duo. It's not 'groove' playing precisely, but it follows many grooves simultaneously, much like Orcutt's own melodic musings -- which is why they're so naturally lock-in-key here. Which maybe makes it all the more surprising that Made Out of Sound was in fact recorded in different rooms on different coasts at different times, and stitched together by Orcutt on his desktop. Corsano recorded the drums in Ithaca, NY, and (as Orcutt states), 'I didn't edit them at all. I overdubbed two guitar tracks, panned left/right. I'd listen to the drums a couple times, pick a tuning, then improvise a part, thinking of the first track as backing and the second as the 'lead', though those are pretty fluid terms. I was watching the waveforms as I was recording, so I could see when a crescendo was coming or when to bring it down.' Fluidity ties the tracks together. With a little more groove and a little less around-the-beat maneuvering, one could almost hear the boiling harmonic layers as Miles-oid in 'Man Carrying Thing,' but with new-found Sharrockian modalities, Corsano accentuating the tumbling nature of the falling notes. The Sharrock vein continues with 'How to Cook a Wolf,' its Blind Willie-esque melodic simplicity and repetition extrapolated 360-style in a repetitive descending riff that falls into Cippolina-isms (by way of Verlaine) until the end crashes upon the shore. Much like Orcutt's last solo album, Odds Against Tomorrow (PAL 056CD/LP, 2019), there's a gentler, almost pastoral flow to some tracks ('Some Tennessee Jar,' 'A Port in Air,' 'Thirteen Ways of Looking') that calls to mind the mixolydian swamplands of Lonnie Liston Smith -- but unlike Odds, other tracks ('The Thing Itself') smash that same lyricism into overdriven, multi-dimensional melodic clumps that push several vector envelopes at once in an Interstellar Space vein. With the help of Corsano, Orcutt has managed to slither even further out of the noise/improv pigeonhole lazy listeners/writers keep trying to shove him into. Looking at the back cover of Made Out of Sound, we should not see Orcutt hurling a guitar into the air with post-punk bravado, Corsano toiling behind him in the engine room -- we should witness an instrument levitating from his hands, rising on invisible major-key tendrils of melody, fired by percussion, spiraling into an invisible event horizon..." --Tom Carter

$13.50 NOT IN STOCK

"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 this long-time duo -- but if you've been able to listen past the overmodulated icepick fidelity of Harry Pussy, it should surprise you not an iota that Orcutt's style is rooted as much in the fractal melodies of Trane and Taylor as it is in Delta syrup or Tin Pan Alley glitz. As for Corsano, well, it may seem daft to call this particular record 'jazz' (because duh, it has a drummer), but to me Corsano is beyond jazz, almost beyond music, his ambidextrous, octopoid technique grappling many stylistic levers and spraying a torrent of light from every direction. Corsano's ferocity has elevated many 'mere' improv records to transcendence, but here he's crafted his polyrhythms within more narrative channels, bringing to mind his 'mannered' playing in the lamented Flower-Corsano duo. It's not 'groove' playing precisely, but it follows many grooves simultaneously, much like Orcutt's own melodic musings -- which is why they're so naturally lock-in-key here. Which maybe makes it all the more surprising that Made Out of Sound was in fact recorded in different rooms on different coasts at different times, and stitched together by Orcutt on his desktop. Corsano recorded the drums in Ithaca, NY, and (as Orcutt states), 'I didn't edit them at all. I overdubbed two guitar tracks, panned left/right. I'd listen to the drums a couple times, pick a tuning, then improvise a part, thinking of the first track as backing and the second as the 'lead', though those are pretty fluid terms. I was watching the waveforms as I was recording, so I could see when a crescendo was coming or when to bring it down.' Fluidity ties the tracks together. With a little more groove and a little less around-the-beat maneuvering, one could almost hear the boiling harmonic layers as Miles-oid in 'Man Carrying Thing,' but with new-found Sharrockian modalities, Corsano accentuating the tumbling nature of the falling notes. The Sharrock vein continues with 'How to Cook a Wolf,' its Blind Willie-esque melodic simplicity and repetition extrapolated 360-style in a repetitive descending riff that falls into Cippolina-isms (by way of Verlaine) until the end crashes upon the shore. Much like Orcutt's last solo album, Odds Against Tomorrow (PAL 056CD/LP, 2019), there's a gentler, almost pastoral flow to some tracks ('Some Tennessee Jar,' 'A Port in Air,' 'Thirteen Ways of Looking') that calls to mind the mixolydian swamplands of Lonnie Liston Smith -- but unlike Odds, other tracks ('The Thing Itself') smash that same lyricism into overdriven, multi-dimensional melodic clumps that push several vector envelopes at once in an Interstellar Space vein. With the help of Corsano, Orcutt has managed to slither even further out of the noise/improv pigeonhole lazy listeners/writers keep trying to shove him into. Looking at the back cover of Made Out of Sound, we should not see Orcutt hurling a guitar into the air with post-punk bravado, Corsano toiling behind him in the engine room -- we should witness an instrument levitating from his hands, rising on invisible major-key tendrils of melody, fired by percussion, spiraling into an invisible event horizon..." --Tom Carter

$18.50 NOT IN STOCK

Limited repress! 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 July 6, 2016, they rendered a landscape where miniature squalls grind in between seamlessly intersecting improv, and they did it sharp as the slap of a palmful of plum-colored hazelmyer elixir following a good, close shave. The distinctive sound of the Fender Telecaster as played without effects by Orcutt ('one of music's premier abstractionists,' according to Osmo Montesanto) remains unblunted throughout the album, an aggressively serrated presence within Mr. Morley's contrapuntal flanking. This freely improvised performance is imbued with discipline and deliberate restraint, the better to connect the players more to the sound than to the instruments . . . The duo's number-one fan worldwide Cye Husain, pictured on the back cover, would surely attest that the singular structure-building of Orcutt and Morley defies and transcends most any 'well, actually' bloviature that the usual bore-splainers will need to hurl into the troposhere. For instance, that a third guitar is clearly audible at certain parts in the mix -- beautifully recorded by Gabie Strong, by the way -- can be accounted for most sensibly by Aotearoan metaphysics. Mr. Morley's ax of choice was 'Patu Tutae Opoko Nui, a 2006 Squire Telecaster made in Indonesia that I had modified over the years. It died and was ushered up to Valhöll in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2018.' Readers opting to take a moment to refer to Morley's Instagram post dated 6 June 2018 and view the last rites of this extraordinary combination of wood and metal should do so now. He cried. You should expect to do the same . . . Electric Guitar Duets is that otherworldly modulation we all crave and rarely find, hovering halfway between a deeply satisfying lattice of blurred sky roars and the soundtrack from a Stefan Jarworzyn biopic scored by Sergio Leone left on the floor out of its sleeve. Morley and Orcutt hold everything sideways at least as well as the centrifugal force required for slow-motion footage of mannequins riding tiny motorcyles around the inside of a chrome replica of Lee Van Cleef's skull. For other examples of fluid-splattered shards glistening inside crimson murk pulsations, only murder rolling through cold, cold blood comes to mind as superior to this 44-minute live recording." --S. Glass

$13.50 NOT IN STOCK

"After two LPs 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 LP, 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 of the territory charted by Bill Orcutt, his eponymous 2017 studio electric debut, although it's certainly that. With its nods to existing musics, half-step fluctuations, and near-songwriter-ly manipulations of tension/release, Odds Against Tomorrow is a rock record -- almost. Clearly and simply recorded through a clattering Fender Twin in Orcutt's living room and lovingly mixed by Bay Area neighbor and pedal-steel savant Chuck Johnson, no one would mistake it for any era's radio fodder, yet the precision of its technique and the swaying Child-ballad logic of its gentler improvisations comfortably seats it between John Mayall and Richard Thompson in your Ikea Kallax. Three songs ('Odds Against Tomorrow,' 'The Writhing Jar,' 'Already Old') are multi-tracked, an innovation that, for guitar buffs familiar with Orcutt's stripped-down vernacular, jumps out of the grooves like a Les Paul sound-on-sound excursion in 1948, or a Jandek blues rave-up in 1987. Specifically evoking John Lee Hooker's double-track experiments on 1952's 'Walking the Boogie,' the steady chord vamps of 'Odds Against Tomorrow' and 'Already Old' form a harmonic turf on which Orcutt solos with lyrical abandon . . . For the more 'contemporary-minded,' 'The Writhing Jar''s crashing overdubs recall the brassy six-string voicings of This Heat or Illitch. With the exception of the unreconstructed Elmore James-isms of 'Stray Dog' and the 'Layla'-finale-like haze of 'All Your Buried Corpses Begin To Speak,' the remaining non-overdubbed tracks dovetail snugly with Orcutt's previous solo output, reeling gently in a Mazzacane-oid mode or vibing up the standards ('Moon River'). On their own, these tracks would still be an important contribution to Orcutt's canon. As part of Odds Against Tomorrow's greater whole, they provide a through line, connecting the idiosyncrasies of Orcutt's past explorations with the scrambled tropes of his present work. Odds Against Tomorrow challenges contemporary solo guitar practice in a way that simultaneously nullifies hazy dreams of folk purity and establishes a new high-water mark for blues-rock reconstruction." --Tom Carter

$18.00 NOT IN STOCK

2023 repress. LP version. "After two LPs 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 LP, 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 of the territory charted by Bill Orcutt, his eponymous 2017 studio electric debut, although it's certainly that. With its nods to existing musics, half-step fluctuations, and near-songwriter-ly manipulations of tension/release, Odds Against Tomorrow is a rock record -- almost. Clearly and simply recorded through a clattering Fender Twin in Orcutt's living room and lovingly mixed by Bay Area neighbor and pedal-steel savant Chuck Johnson, no one would mistake it for any era's radio fodder, yet the precision of its technique and the swaying Child-ballad logic of its gentler improvisations comfortably seats it between John Mayall and Richard Thompson in your Ikea Kallax. Three songs ('Odds Against Tomorrow,' 'The Writhing Jar,' 'Already Old') are multi-tracked, an innovation that, for guitar buffs familiar with Orcutt's stripped-down vernacular, jumps out of the grooves like a Les Paul sound-on-sound excursion in 1948, or a Jandek blues rave-up in 1987. Specifically evoking John Lee Hooker's double-track experiments on 1952's 'Walking the Boogie,' the steady chord vamps of 'Odds Against Tomorrow' and 'Already Old' form a harmonic turf on which Orcutt solos with lyrical abandon . . . For the more 'contemporary-minded,' 'The Writhing Jar''s crashing overdubs recall the brassy six-string voicings of This Heat or Illitch. With the exception of the unreconstructed Elmore James-isms of 'Stray Dog' and the 'Layla'-finale-like haze of 'All Your Buried Corpses Begin To Speak,' the remaining non-overdubbed tracks dovetail snugly with Orcutt's previous solo output, reeling gently in a Mazzacane-oid mode or vibing up the standards ('Moon River'). On their own, these tracks would still be an important contribution to Orcutt's canon. As part of Odds Against Tomorrow's greater whole, they provide a through line, connecting the idiosyncrasies of Orcutt's past explorations with the scrambled tropes of his present work. Odds Against Tomorrow challenges contemporary solo guitar practice in a way that simultaneously nullifies hazy dreams of folk purity and establishes a new high-water mark for blues-rock reconstruction." --Tom Carter

$18.50 NOT IN STOCK

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's newly expanded trio lineup of Bill Orcutt, Adris Hoyos and Mark Feehan toured with Dead C, Sebadoh, and Sonic Youth. Thurston played their video on MTV's 120 Minutes. Nirvana gave them shout outs. Everyone expected the sophomore Harry Pussy LP would be more of the same, a logical next step, a synapse-melting punk orgasm that would shatter the coke-bottle spectacles of noise stoners, record store clerks, and college radio DJs across the USA. Instead, we got Ride A Dove: a 30-minute, tempo-less, musique concrète collage of feedback, whiny Sonic Youth fans, overdriven room tone, hijacked jungle beats, unhinged screaming, and the near-constant squall of the self-oscillating low-pass filter on Orcutt's Korg MS-20. Recorded on Sony Walkman and Tascam Portastudio, mixed through a RAT distortion pedal, then chopped and scrambled with SoundEdit 16, it took to new heights the Siltbreeze tradition of terrorizing mastering engineers by burying everything with shitty post-production (cf. Jim Shepard's Radio Shack reverb on his Picking Through the Wreckage With a Stick LP). Thanks to the single unbanded groove on each side (and similarly unindexed CD), the relationship of Ride A Dove's 'songs' to its listed song titles -- which allude to Michael Jackson, the Bee Gees, and most of all, Black Flag, whose 'Rise Above' is echoed by the malaprop of the album title -- was decidedly obscure. One might be forgiven for characterizing this career anti-move as a simple challenge, an 'ok, sell THIS' to an unsuspecting distributor -- Matador Records, who surely had no idea what they were getting into when they scooped up Siltbreeze for a manufacturing and distribution deal -- or to fans naively anticipating simple catharsis. Rather, Ride A Dove is an intensely personal document of a disintegrating marriage and band; a snapshot of an era when noise groups were unexpectedly emerging from complete darkness into mere shadow; a diary of questionable decisions regarding marital fidelity and drug consumption. It's a raw, vulnerable record that is more Rumours (1977) than Metal Machine Music (1975). In the aftermath of Ride A Dove, and the near-apocalyptic Harry Pussy/Shadow Ring/Charalambides tour that followed it, life went on. Bill and Adris split up, guitarist Mark Feehan decamped, and Harry Pussy soldiered on for a few more records, including the sleeper double LP Let's Build a Pussy (EMEGO 146LP), which perhaps stands closer to Ride A Dove's high-register wail and conceptual monomania than any other of the band's recordings. As for Ride A Dove itself, the intervening decades has made it almost fashionable, yet harshly adorned in a raggedness that's as cozy as a fiberglass sweater." --Tom Carter Adris Hoyos - drums; Bill Orcutt - guitar; Mark Feehan - guitar.

$18.50 IN STOCK

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, or playing relatively spacious free-rock, Corsano is able to provide the proper base for his aural sculpting. A lot of Orcutt's instrumental work has traditionally felt hermetic even though he's exploring caverns of explosive ecstasy. One often got the impression Bill was operating in the way John Travolta did in the classic 1976 ABC television drama, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. Orcutt's actual interaction with collaborators emerged not from communication so much as pure observation. While he was fully cognizant of his musical surroundings, his reactions to it were walled off. This approach did not encourage sonic dialogue so much as parallel streams of discourse. These streams could interact with each other, but not in particularly standard ways. On Brace Up! , their first ever studio release, this precept has changed considerably. Whether it's a function of emotional familiarity or an intellectual choice I dunno, but there's a whole new kind of duo exchange going down on this record. Bill and Chris are clearly playing off each other's moves throughout the album. And it really raises the level of the music to an all-time high. From the cop car see-saw of 'Poundland Frenzy' to the mutual pummeling of 'Paranoid Time' (possibly a Minutemen tribute?) to the lazychicken- gets-stung-prog of 'She Punched a Hole in the Moon for Me,' the sounds on Brace Up! display a constant flow of ideas and instantaneous conjugation of newly forged verbs. As great as Bill and Chris's previous duo records have been, this one's greater." -- Byron Coley

$18.50 LOW STOCK LEVEL

Previously unreleased mid-'90s live recordings of Harry Pussy in peak trio formation, with extensive eye-witness liner notes by Siltbreeze label-head Tom Lax and Tom Carter of Charalambides. Edition of 500.

"The 1996 Shadow Ring / Harry Pussy / Charalambides 'Rose Watson' tour. . . . There were two vans, three bands, two drivers. Tom Lax was at the helm, rationing the booze and blasting Killed By Death Volume Whatever all through the Midwest. I walked out of a gig in Ypsilanti and tripped on a large dildo. Soundmen held their ears in Cleveland. We rolled out of Rochester (after Adris and my bandmate Jason blew an entire soundcheck screaming insults at each other in Spanish) and the soundman stuck his head in the car and yelled 'don't ever come back!' Byron Coley booked a show in Amherst with an audience of zero. Harry Pussy and Shadow Ring played, we didn't, and everyone was hanging out afterwards in front of the Unitarian Church when the local bus pulled up. Its lone occupant stepped out, looked around, and asked 'Is this where the Harry Pussy show is?' The TT's show, snipped from the end of this tour, was a shambolic near disaster. The fact that a recording survives at all is a minor miracle. We arrived to witness openers the Cotton Kings fleeing the venue after eating a bunch of acid, destroying the PA monitors, and swiping Adris's cymbals, which one tripping, bathrobe-clad member slunk back to return later. . . . Mr. Lax tried to calm me down by feeding me bourbon shots. We played. The PA was shot and we couldn't hear each other. I hurled my guitar across the stage, poured my beer over my head, and threw a pair of slides into the crowd, narrowly missing Wayne Rogers. Harry Pussy took the stage and sandblasted the night into oblivion, while I hid in the van (Mac: 'What the fuck is your problem?') until I was sober enough to attempt to find the Greyhound station and catch the first bus back to Houston. Christina spotted me wandering off and forcibly dragged me back into the club." --Tom Carter

$13.50 NOT IN STOCK

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 still in evidence. But here, his developing melodicism maps a near-contemplative mental realm, orbiting St. Joan-era Loren Connors more than the cascading treble clatter of his duo LPs with Chris Corsano and others. From the first notes of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman", there's a lucidity and slow-burning lyricism that make Orcutt's plunges into barbed-wire fingerpicking all the more striking. While no one's about to mistake Orcutt for Jim Hall, you could probably play this for your jazzbo friends (should you be unlucky enough to have them) without raising any eyebrows. Orcutt's track selection mirrors his obsession with American popular song in its most banal manifestations, as radically reimagined via acoustic guitar on a variety of releases, including 2013's exhaustive Twenty Five Songs 7" box set, and the Editions Mego album A History of Every One (EMEGO 173CD/LP, 2013). Many of the songs from those two releases are here -- but stretched into new arrangements that explore the upper regions of the guitar neck (hitherto unexplorable on his shakily-intonated acoustic Kay), and lighting up new corners of each arrangement with a sensitivity born from years of reinterpretation. The result is a languid, freeform drift through Orcutt's internal cosmos into galaxies unknown to their original interpreters -- and occasionally, Orcutt himself. Most striking is "White Christmas", its careening low-register melodies crashing into complex chords that transcend Orcutt's primitive four-string fretboard. Orcutt's original compositions are equally striking. One of them -- "The World Without Me" -- is unique to this album, and notable for its trebly flurry of Clapton-esque 12th-fret drizzle. "O Platitudes!" by contrast, spins ever-faster in the cadence of a hand-cranked music box, before grinding to a near halt, its higher-key electricity standing in for the moaning vocalizations on Orcutt's acoustic rendition as heard on his 2014 VDSQ LP. With its deep-space beauty, harmonic complexity, and dark dissonance, Bill Orcutt is a stunning landmark in Orcutt's form-destroying trajectory. Last copies...

$18.50 NOT IN STOCK

2021 repress. 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 still in evidence. But here, his developing melodicism maps a near-contemplative mental realm, orbiting St. Joan-era Loren Connors more than the cascading treble clatter of his duo LPs with Chris Corsano and others. From the first notes of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman", there's a lucidity and slow-burning lyricism that make Orcutt's plunges into barbed-wire fingerpicking all the more striking. While no one's about to mistake Orcutt for Jim Hall, you could probably play this for your jazzbo friends (should you be unlucky enough to have them) without raising any eyebrows. Orcutt's track selection mirrors his obsession with American popular song in its most banal manifestations, as radically reimagined via acoustic guitar on a variety of releases, including 2013's exhaustive Twenty Five Songs 7" box set, and the Editions Mego album A History of Every One (EMEGO 173CD/LP, 2013). Many of the songs from those two releases are here -- but stretched into new arrangements that explore the upper regions of the guitar neck (hitherto unexplorable on his shakily-intonated acoustic Kay), and lighting up new corners of each arrangement with a sensitivity born from years of reinterpretation. The result is a languid, freeform drift through Orcutt's internal cosmos into galaxies unknown to their original interpreters -- and occasionally, Orcutt himself. Most striking is "White Christmas", its careening low-register melodies crashing into complex chords that transcend Orcutt's primitive four-string fretboard. Orcutt's original compositions are equally striking. One of them -- "The World Without Me" -- is unique to this album, and notable for its trebly flurry of Clapton-esque 12th-fret drizzle. "O Platitudes!" by contrast, spins ever-faster in the cadence of a hand-cranked music box, before grinding to a near halt, its higher-key electricity standing in for the moaning vocalizations on Orcutt's acoustic rendition as heard on his 2014 VDSQ LP. With its deep-space beauty, harmonic complexity, and dark dissonance, Bill Orcutt is a stunning landmark in Orcutt's form-destroying trajectory.

$25.50 NOT IN STOCK

"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 of the two Palilalia cassettes that followed it. The tracks were recorded between a couple of tours, one in 2013 and one the following year, in Northampton, Mexico City, Brooklyn, Montreal, Cleveland and Rochester. And they demonstrate the ferocity of Orcutt's return to the electric guitar. Twinned-up with Corsano, Bill goes for the most distorted and bleeding tones available, whether pouring out frenzied clusters, or slow-bending blue-notes in the tradition of Loren Connors, the raunch of the proceedings is a physical presence. And Corsano goes deep into rolls and splashes with an almost perverted intensity. There ain't much space here for sweetness or subtlety. The music is driven home with mallets, achieving a near-Beefheartian density in spots. Heard as a whole, this album provides a gush of relentless thug-beauty of a sort that has never been in long supply. Grasp it now or hold your sad peace for now and ever." -- Byron Coley. Double LP with gatefold cover. Recorded by Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt on tour in 2013 and 2014. Reissue of two cassettes originally released on Palilalia as Live At Various and Various Live. Edition of 500.

$18.50 NOT IN STOCK

Gatefold LP version. Edition of 750. 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, pummeling free improvisation. Mixed by Frank Falestra at Dan Hosker Studios in Miami Beach; mastered by James Plotkin; designed by Bill Orcutt.