From left to right: The Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet is composed of guitarists Shane Parish, Ava Mendoza, Wendy Eisenberg, and Bill Orcutt—each virtuosos from the world of experimental music.
Bill Orcutt - "The World Without Me" [official video]
From Bill Orcutt's self-titled solo electric album, from 2017.
That friend was Tim Koffley, who joined Orcutt in the post-rock duo Watt. “We played together for a couple of years, and that was all it took to take root,” says Orcutt. He followed his brief time with Watt with a successful foray into noise-rock with his notorious duo Harry Pussy, and, since their disbandment in the late ’90s, has gradually entered—and today, finds himself fully immersed in—the realm of experimental music.
On his latest release, Four Guitars Live, Orcutt is accompanied by a trio of virtuosic shredders from the world of experimental music: Wendy Eisenberg, Shane Parish, and Ava Mendoza. (Each of the guitarists plays their instrument strung with four strings.) You might have seen this quartet on NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series last April, cramming their Telecasters and Jazzmasters into an office packed with knick-knacks. It’s a thrill to hear their spidery riffs interlacing and peeling off into solos, filling the room with rowdy whoops and claps. Four Guitars Live captures the same group seven months later, performing at Utrecht, Netherland’s festival Le Guess Who?
On Four Guitars Live, each member of the quartet performs on a guitar strung with just four strings.
The pulsing, Steve Reich-like minimalist compositions performed on Four Guitars Live first appeared on Orcutt’s 2022 solo album, Music for Four Guitars. The seed for that project was planted in 2015, when Orcutt was asked by a friend in Columbus, Ohio, to write some music for his guitar quartet. “I couldn’t come up with anything and wasn’t sure how to proceed, but the idea stuck with me,” Orcutt says. “After seven years of poking at it, I cracked the code. Then it took me a few months and it was done.”
Growing up in Miami without older siblings, Orcutt says he “didn’t like music” until his parents bought him a Yamaha acoustic guitar and a turntable. Reading record reviews led him to The Last Waltz, where Muddy Waters’ playing made an outsized impression. “[My parents] also got me guitar lessons, but I had no interest, so it was only a chore,” Orcutt says. “I didn’t enjoy it and there was nothing interesting about the material the teacher was presenting to me, so that ended pretty quickly.”
As he familiarized himself with the Florida music scene of the early ’90s, Orcutt bought his first electric guitar—a Japan-made Stratocaster copy—and met his now ex-wife, Adris Hoyos. Forming the duo Harry Pussy, they continued Orcutt’s 4-string journey, releasing their music on small independent labels like Siltbreeze and Chocolate Monk. “The music I made with Watt was very structured,” says Orcutt. “Even when I took a solo, they were kind of fixed. After a few years I decided I wanted to have more room to improvise. It wasn’t just me, either. Adris had never even touched a drum kit before we recorded our first single. We had this momentum that was like going down a hill.”
Following the duo’s separation, Orcutt spent a decade on filmmaking, software engineering, and electronic music, surprising listeners with his 2009 acoustic comeback album, A New Way to Pay Old Debts. With that and subsequent releases, Orcutt’s rambling improvisations on the Kay guitar he’s played since college have ushered in an awe-inspiring second act. “At that time, I was living in an apartment with kids,” says Orcutt. “I didn’t have access to a practice space, so the acoustic guitar just made sense. After playing it for a while, this thing I had for many years took on some kind of significance, and I mainly just really enjoyed it.”
The Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet's Gear
The compositions performed on Four Guitars Live were originally released on the quartet’s studio full-length, Music for Four Guitars.
Guitars
- Fender Telecaster – Bill Orcutt
- 1994 MIJ Fender Jazzmaster – Wendy Eisenberg
- Squier Telecaster – Shane Parish
- Novo Serus made by Dennis Fano – Ava Mendoza
Amps
- Fender Hot Rod Deluxe – Orcutt
- Fender Deluxe – Eisenberg
- Fender Deluxe Reverb – Parish
- Fender Blues Deluxe – Mendoza
Effects
- Electronic Audio Experiments Longsword V4.5 – Eisenberg
- Boss BD-2 Blues Driver – Parish
- 1990s Pro Co RAT, Joyo JF-13 AC Tone, Xotic USA Super Clean Buffer – Mendoza
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinky – Orcutt
- D’Addario Pure Chromes .011–.050 – Eisenberg
- D’Addario (.010s) – Parish
- D’Addario or Ernie Ball .010–.048 – Mendoza
- Dunlop Standard 1 mm – Orcutt
- D’Andrea Pro Plec 358 – Eisenberg
- Dunlop Tortex .88 mm – Parish
- D’Addario Duralin 1.2 mm – Mendoza
When Music for Four Guitars was completed, Orcutt realized it was the first album he had written without improvisation since his former band’s 1996 swan song, Ride a Dove. At that point, they were a trio, with the addition of second guitarist Mark Feehan. “After we became a trio, the question was how do we make a less obvious kind of structure?” says Orcutt. “It was difficult to organize something that seemed completely chaotic. We ended up right back where Adris and I started, with fixed solos and no improvisation.”
Performing Music for Four Guitars live was made possible by Athens, Georgia-based guitarist Shane Parish, who was commissioned by Orcutt as a transcriber. “At first, it was almost like a novelty idea to help sell the album—buy the digital download on Bandcamp and you get the PDF score,” Orcutt laughs. “So it wasn’t initially the idea that it would be used with a real quartet. I couldn’t quite imagine that, at that time!”
After completing his first European tour with the quartet, Orcutt discovered the stark differences between performing composed scores as a group and improvising. “There are spaces for improvising in our set, but it’s very different from going out and playing free,” Orcutt says. “In some ways it’s a lot less frantic. It’s more about focusing, feeling the music, and the other players.”
Orcutt chanced upon his 4-string setup in the ’80s, when his neglected guitar “randomly” ended up with four strings.
Reflecting on his unlikely transition from the noise-rock underground to NPR, Orcutt still catches himself in moments of astonishment. For an artist whose previous band channeled Captain Beefheart with the brute fury of Black Flag and the speed of Canadian teen punks NEOs, it’s hard to imagine making this kind of leap. But the beauty of Orcutt’s guitar playing has led him into mainstream spaces.“Harry Pussy did get played on MTV’s 120 Minutes when Thurston Moore hosted,” says Orcutt. “And when Nirvana played Miami, Kurt Cobain told thousands of people in the audience to go see us. But for the most part, we were so far out that even the indie-rock writers wouldn’t touch us.” As for his latest ascension, he comments, “I don’t think we ever believed that such a thing was possible.”
Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet: Tiny Desk Concert
Bill Orcutt is joined by Wendy Eisenberg, Shane Parish, and Ava Mendoza on NPR’s Tiny Desk, performing compositions from his album, Music for Four Guitars.
“I need to be in a punk band at the same time as I need to be playing free improv at the same time as I need to be playing songs,” Wendy Eisenberg explains, detailing their creative process. “All at the same time—otherwise none of the practices will work for me.” Listening to Eisenberg’s work, this is easily understood.
Take Eisenberg’s new record, Auto, for example. The album opens with the ballad “I Don’t Want To,” which combines clean sounds from Eisenberg’s ES-175 and glitchy electronics à la Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs’ experimental creations as Gastr Del Sol. “Centreville” follows, with Eisenberg taking a tech-y and angular approach to guitar riffage, followed by the sunny, jazz-pop groove of “No Such Lack.” In just three tracks, Eisenberg has covered plenty of ground and the album proceeds with sustained versatility throughout.
Each stylistic jump on Auto is studied and focused and serves a distinct musical purpose, so the album makes the case that this sort of big-ears, genre-hopping approach is home for Eisenberg and is an aesthetic in and of itself. It’s no surprise when Eisenberg name-drops composer John Zorn’s iconoclastic Naked City band—whose extreme genre-pastiche approach is both groundbreaking and truly incomparable—as part of their education. “I went to NEC [New England Conservatory] for their Contemporary Improv masters,” the guitarist says. “It happened to coincide with Zorn’s 60th birthday concerts, where I got to play a bunch of Naked City parts.”
After college, Eisenberg continued to have multiple stylistic irons in the fire. Eisenberg was quick to become a regular player in the New York City experimental scene, where they stayed connected with Zorn, who released The Machinic Unconscious, Eisenberg’s trio record with bassist Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle and countless Zorn projects) and drummer Ches Smith (Marc Ribot, Tim Berne). Meanwhile, Eisenberg was actively involved in the Western Massachusetts music scene, living there until recently moving to New York, and worked with several rock and noise bands including the Birthing Hips, whose dissolution inspired Auto.
It’s easy to hear similarities between Birthing Hips—whose own “genre-play,” as Eisenberg explains, is quickly identifiable, especially on “Strip Tease,” where Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy” theme can be heard accompanied by a blast of noise-rock ripping—and Auto, but the latter feels much more nuanced and personal. As a player, Eisenberg takes on such a wide variety of playing approaches, from angular riffing to contrapuntal chord melodies to short flashes of bossa nova comping and so much more—all of which seem to come naturally and in support of the well-crafted songs. Producer Nick Zanca contributes much of the synths and electronic elements that color and surround Eisenberg’s playing, providing a cohesive sonic landscape, while Eisenberg’s warm, plainly-stated singing navigates the conceptual changes and helps form a united whole to the album.
Eisenberg is a sharp musical thinker, so we took this opportunity to catch up and discuss Auto and to pick their brain about everything from practice materials to improvisation and composition concepts.
What about improvisation is important to you and your guitar playing?
Improvisation, on the guitar, is a way for me to know the guitar better. At this point, because I’ve been so married to the guitar for years, I feel like by exploring the guitar I’m actually exploring myself and I feel like improvisation actually affords you that. If you’re doing composed work, you’re exploring something outside of you. Maybe I’m selfish, but there’s less potential for something there for me than the self-exploration that is part of improvising on an instrument that you know.
I think what’s important about it is that your body can surprise you. So, if you’re doing a discipline that has less to do with the regurgitation of ideas—in composed music or in genre-specific improvised work—if you’re going against those techniques, your literal physical intuition starts to matter differently. A lot of my vocabulary and my approaches come from whatever my body wants to do on the guitar at the time, which usually just has to do with me stretching out an impulse. So, if I want to play a little cluster or a melody, then I’ll want to stretch it out using a shape or developing it in some way, rhythmically or off the fretboard.
Would you share some of the background behind writing Auto?
I had this improvising/composed genre-play band called Birthing Hips, and when we broke up I was kind of worried that I wouldn’t be able to write the same way.Birthing Hips didn’t work out and I was writing as a way to take stock of what musically was still there for me to say. I was really approaching the composition of each song like I wanted to use my influences, but not consciously. I wanted to be as true to the experience of loss that I had from the band and also from the incredible seismic mid-20s changes that were happening at the time.
While writing the album Auto, Wendy Eisenberg had two guidelines: “The song had to be good, which is hopefully a challenge that all songwriters need to follow, and the song also has to convey with accuracy and, hopefully a little bit of grace, the emotional state via the music.”
Musically, there are some things that are more stock than others. There’s a song on there called “Genre Fiction” that’s basically a folk song, and there’s other stuff that’s super complicated, like “Centreville.” That’s about the divorce between your brain and your body when you have to sing and play at the same time.
All of these things were little challenges I set to myself: The song had to be good, which is hopefully a challenge that all songwriters need to follow, and the song also has to convey with accuracy and, hopefully, a little bit of grace, the emotional state via the music.
What are those influences you’re exploring on this album?
There’s a lot of Arto Lindsay’s songs. Ted Reichman [composer and Eisenberg’s former professor at NEC] once told me that my songs were like his and I didn’t think it was true and I slowly wanted to make it true because his songs are great. I was really into his Mundo Civilizado kind of stuff, because the fact that he could do that and [no-wave band] DNA and [avant-pop duo] Ambitious Lovers and everything, I mean…. I think it’s him and Eugene Chadbourne that care as much about improvisation as they do about songs on the guitar.
So, I feel like I was coming from an Arto Lindsay place and also a João Gilberto and Juana Molinaworld, where the songcraft is super important, but there’s also humor and exploration. Songs can so easily become stock and improvisation can so easily become stock, so I wanted the record to be at the midpoint of innovation in both of those genres.
I was wondering if Gastr Del Sol was part of that.
I like to listen to Gastr Del Sol and definitely the way the records are produced informed the production 100 percent, but I never think of trying to write the way they do. I think the producer on the record was thinking about that a lot, because there’s that acoustic guitar and electronics thing.