BILL ORCUTT Vinyl & CDs

Review: Bill Orcutt's approach to the guitar feels less like playing and more like detonating: a flurry of stabbing phrases, mangled blues motifs and broken time signatures that teeter constantly on the edge of collapse. It's a sound he's refined over decades, from his early days in Miami's punk and noise scenes to his present-day experiments in live-coded digital abstraction. This new album, which features two versions of 'Anxiety of Symmetry', finds him at his most feral and funny in years i a twisted tribute to the clunky MIDI guitar presets of the 90s, rendered via his cracked-software experiments with two fifteen-minute compositions built from a single concept: six sung numbers, each mapped precisely to pitches in a major scale. These micro-phrases ('1-2', '1-2-3', and so on) repeat and multiply, creating swirling polymetric harmonies that flicker between gentle hypnosis and algorithmic overload. Female voices loop in cycles of uneven length, forming structures reminiscent of Glass's Einstein on the Beach, but without its theatricalityithis is music of obsession, not spectacle. The emotional register is unusually soft for Orcutt, but behind the surface calm lies a meticulous compulsion. In an essay of the same name, he aligns this method with "Just Right" OCD, proposing a feedback loop between mental fixation and machine logic. What emerges isn't ambient in any passive sense, but a kind of orderly unravelingicomposition as therapeutic ritual, echoing the recursive spirals of Hanne Darboven or the trance-state potential of counting itself.

Review: Bill Orcutt is hailed the world over for his distinctive blues-infused, free improvisational acoustic guitar rah, a craft he's honed since his 2009 solo record A New Way To Pay Old Debts, which marked his return to music after the dissolution of the influential noise rock band Harry Pussy. Beyond music, Orcutt worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley for over 20 years; and suitably, his more recent works have introduced homespun analogue guitar work to the art of electronic estrangement, technocratizing a formerly scruffy sound. After the experimental 2011 release 'Let's Build A Pussy', through which he manipulated a second-long "drum vocal" into an hour-long piece, here he further embraces the encroaching tide of digital tech with 'A Mechanical Joey', yet another 35-minute track spread over two antipodean sides; this one involves an outsider-arty, heteroclitic manipulation of a six-time Joey Ramone sample.

Review: Harry Pussy co-founder Bill Orcutt has since moved on from those riotous noise rock years to explore other modes of expression with his guitar. Across an accomplished and many-sided career he's laid down a powerful statement against the idea everything's been done on six strings, and this album is another fine case in point. If the title sounds formal, don't be fooled - there's a raucous energy to Music For Four Guitars. It sounds free and raw, even as it deals in minimal motions between clashing axes played by Orcutt in conversation with himself.