In 1997 Bill Orcutt split from his then wife, Harry Pussy bandmate Adris Hoyos, and wouldn’t play music for a decade. One of the most exciting musicians of the 1990s went on to become a coder.
It’s not the obvious path for someone who’d been working as an English lecturer at the University of Miami, but then there’s nothing typical about Orcutt, whose music is a mix of styles, genres and instruments singular to himself.
He wanted to study art at university but was advised by his parents to pursue something more practical, so did architecture for a few semesters before switching to English, which he went on to complete a masters in.
Originally performing as a solo guitarist and in a band, Watt, around 1990, he operated in Harry Pussy from 1993-1997. With three albums released by the duo. Today the albums still stand-up as solid, experimental forays and are recognised for helping kick start the “noise” genre. Pushing the envelope of dissonant sounds and experimental DIY practices.
In Harry Pussy the group presented a broad sonic aesthetic, arrived at through a handful of differing approaches to music making. The band’s final album, released after they had split, features a second of Adris’ voice stretched over an hour of recording.
It would be his last release for over a decade. Taking time away from music to focus on a family and his career in coding. If you listen to the Harry Pussy records it’s hard to imagine someone being so deeply entrenched in composition, to then take a step back. I guess it’s not that unusual, but in the context of a highly inspiring career that has delighted so many music fans, it’s a little odd.
For the past 40 plus years he has developed styles and cultivated audiences that thrive on the unexpected: different modes of attack, jumps across the fretboard, removed strings, bust strings, demented repetition.
Somehow, despite the extended break he has produced over 100 records — one of the ideas I had behind writing a brief overview of his music was to work through as many as I could. For years some of his music was mythic. His three records with Harry Pussy were stuff of legend, revered and difficult to source. However over the last few years Bill has — through a desire to see things re-released, and I believe the need to keep up a regular product line — happily reprinted and digitised many of his great works. For which I am very grateful; his records were printed in modest runs, and as a result command high prices on the second hand market.
His portfolio is immense, both in the magical intricacies that appear inside each conceptual work — a mix of simple concepts contrasted with detailed expressions of play.
It’s my firm belief that he has amassed a back catalogue that should be assessed as a singular piece of work. Some records are designed to be a continuation of the last, others can be a return to a previous line of investigation. Some are later versions of earlier recordings, taken forward, and others are near perfect repeats of a studio album before an audience.
In their mature and explored tonality Orcutt’s records talk to each other despite radically different instruments production and outputs.
It is always a conversation. Sometimes that’s between him and the instrument. Sometimes the dialogue is with his collaborators who transcribe, compose, improvise and perform his work. These conversations make the work rest easy on the ear, unimposing and deft. There’s a magic to this. He’s so careful and reverent to each note, that many mistake some of his compositions for improv or free jazz.
Somewhere in between all these contrasts and juxtapositions is an artist searching for their work.
Orcutt is a rare gemstone in the avant-garde world in that he is a practical technician of his craft. He’s someone who follows the natural patterns that music makes and the mechanical demands of the musician, which is quite unusual for someone whose work sits on an introspective, near meditative plain. His work features conceptual ideas that offer firm ground for detailed and careful compositions. Bill follows the trail and sees where it takes him. What makes his sound so appealing is that you can hear the thinking from one note and the next. The sound of a composer trying to figure out where the melody demands to go next.
“With my music I always feel like I’m battling the reactionaries who think that music has something to do with listening. Like they’re the centre of the universe and everything is done for their benefit. Fuck off. Music does what it wants.”
It’s an enjoyable sport to watch him, disgruntled, call time on the line of questioning and just explicitly arrive at some rather blunt, singular thinking. Mild mannered on stage and lethally focussed in interview.
It’s probable that Bill doesn’t have a true idea of how remarkable his work really is, nor how he keeps a full toolkit of skills. You can tell he’s been an academic, but it’s surprising it wasn’t in music. From conceptual thinking, macro problem solving, technical performance and intricate listening he’s as much a complete musician as any of his peers or progenitors.
I want to avoid making arguments that compare totally different musicians to Orcutt, because it does them no favours and will struggle to articulate how singular he is. Part outsider part scholar. To me he’s a musician who’s very far down the road in terms of technical ability, conceptual levity, and tonal maturity.
One of the most recognisable traits in his music, beyond his fearless thinking, is his use of 4 string guitar, which he has done since 1990.
“I have two tunings—one is standard. I remove the A and the D strings. It’s four strings, but the strings that are there are tuned the same way they would be for concert tuning, concert pitch. The other tuning I have is just tuning that low E string up to a G.
“I got a guitar when I was a teenager—my parents bought it for me. And I got lessons, briefly. But in the eighties I was playing drums in a band and the guitar was not getting used very much. And somehow or another it wound up with four strings, those four strings. Instead of fixing it I just started writing songs around that configuration. And that was the beginning of it. But I was in my twenties, and it was sometime in the eighties.”
What could be seen as a pinnacle of his outputs, Music For Four Guitars is a group of pure composition that mixes the wildness of Harry Pussy with the phasing and minimalism of his Four Estates work. It’s a marriage of two styles that make him incredibly popular amongst fans.
What makes his music so brilliant, in my view, is that to an album the first few listens are easy going, unfussy, and perfectly pleasant, and each of them continues to reveal more and more depth as you get into them. Consistently being highly praised by anyone who comes across his music. I remember playing Orcutt to the cellist Abel Selaocoe at a house party in 2014. How we sat there, stoned, and in awe of what we heard. The album had played out before we remembered we were at a party to socialise and had to snap out of the trance. There’s something irreverent about his playing, like he’s not looking to appease the audience, just play the notes the music demands.
If there was a point in which people had been able to recognise Orcutt for a signature sound or style of playing, in 2015 he shocked some of his most likeminded fans. Taking the skills he had developed in his work as a coder he made Cracked, an open source music programming tool, in which sounds are manipulated by code. A digital instrument for a man who plays an avant-garde form of blues guitar. A giant polymath making a mouse of us.
Cracked — or to use its full name, ‘i_dropped_my_phone_the_screen_cracked’ — is free on GitHub, “I hope someone will use it and do something different with it than I thought of. [It] has no traditional user interface, no buttons or knobs, just a window to code into. As you type, changes are interpreted immediately and the sound updates as you go.”
There’s interviews in which he speaks about Gertrude Stein, The Making of American, and digging through GitHub there’s an audio sample of Stein in the open source Sample deck. He also references The Making of America in the title of his album A History of Every One. The Stein novel is a major monument of a modernist text, one that I’ll never get close to reading more than half a session’s worth. There’s something intimidating if this is the type of novel he could chew over breakfast. Or that something as weighty as a novel would be hidden inside a sample within a mountain of folders, inside a music program, posted on a major online programming library.
Snapping out of this world within worlds, Orcutt, a practical thinker, used Cracked for his 2017 album ‘self-help’, released on Fake Estates, a label he has set up for these electronic forays. The label releases not just the music but sometimes the source code for the records on Cracked. The computer language that when pasted into the programme — the interface is similar to a blank .txt page — will playback the record.
Everything the label puts out is highly coveted on second hand markets, including “A Mechanical Joey,” which is a phased and modulated composition around Joey Ramone shouting “1, 2, 3, 4”. It’s an abrasive headache inducing record that quickly achieved some sort or cult status. To describe it to friends elicits excitement and intrigue and to play them the record cultivates despair and confusion. I’ve not been able to play it to the end with all my sanity in check. It’s just hit the 15 minute mark on side-A playback and I can feel my brain melt in a joyous, hysteria inducing way.
This sequenced, looped and modulated programming that Cracked facilitates has led to “The Anxiety of Symmetry,” and “The Four Louies.” Which adopt the same principals while sounding completely distinct from each other.
Amusingly the score for A Mechanical Joey is available. While publishing such an absurd thing is very funny, I find it no coincidence it’s been made. The artwork lives hidden inside the process. The manuscript is the source code.
Talking about Cracked on a video presented by INA grm, of all organisations, Orcutt speaks of how he uses it for composition. “I started working on Cracked… to make something that would let me use the guitar in a more computer way.”
One of his traits is that he alternates his practice between guitar, drums and laptop.
This culminates in ‘music for four guitars’ — written as transcription and is seen by many critics, including NPRs Lars Gotrich, as a milestone record, “Could not stop smiling like an idiot the entire time. Life-affirming avant-shred.”
What’s interesting about ‘Music for Four Guitars’ is its balance between the mechanical and the human. This balance is achieved through programmed phases and machine-like repetition. Conceived as a score, the work led to Shane Parish being involved in the arrangements, which in turn led to the assembly of the quartet.
In the context of Bill’s work the manuscript is like a “player piano” with its perforated paper that directs the notes.
The relationship between written score and performance, could be compared to that between computer music and performed. These “transpositions” take place all the time in music, but it is commonly treated as something to overcome, rather than, in Orcutt’s case, a practical and accepted feature of the music.
To me, Orcutt is a triumph of music as practice, of mundane practical craft, of process and exploration. A testament to thinking it through and figuring it out.
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