Bill Orcutt Interview on Foxy Digitalis.
After more than ten years of silence, ex-Harry Pussy guitar player Bill Orcutt released ‘An New Way To Pay Old Debts’, an acoustic hardcore blues record that sounds heavier than all the eclectic guitar records in your collection. It was the best album of 2009.
"A New Way" Reviewed in November’s Wire
They may seem poles apart, but the guitar deconstructions of former Harry Pussy member Bill Orcutt on “A New Way To Pay Old Debts” place him alongside the likes of John Fahey. During the latter years of his life, Fahey deliberately turned his back on his earlier fingerpicking style to explore other ways of how to play solo guitar. To do this he allowed himself to slip into a state of altered consciousness - his fingers instinctively found the notes on the fretboard, but his imagination was unleashed from the routine of chord changing to discover new sounds. Meanwhile Orcutt, on “A New Way To Pay Old Debts”, has absorbed himself in the work of blues legends “Mississippi” Fred McDowell and Lightnin’ Hopkins, flamenco guitarist Ramon Montoya, Bahamian guitar master Joseph Spence and British improvisor Derek Bailey, whose influence echoes loudest here, and crashes these styles together with such enefgy that his guitar sounds in danger of splintering into matchwood.
Orcutt emerged from the ripped and torn environs of the early 1990’s US punk rock/hardcore scene as the guitarist for Harry Pussy, the group he co-founded in 1992 in Miami, Florida with Adris Hoyos on drums and vocals and himself on guitar. Up until their demise in 1997, Harry Pussy performed and recorded an extreme version of hardcore that was stripped bare of melody, rhythm or chorus, leaving only the aftershock of Hoyos’s piercing vocal and Orcutt’s tangle of broken guitar music dangling dangerously in the air.
Before ending the group, Orcutt and Hoyos collaborated on “Let’s Build A Pussy”, an obscure double LP that was constructed from a single one second recording of Hoyos screaming that Orcutt - credited as playing “mouse” - had digitally stretched out to fill all four sides of the album. Described by one disgruntled reviewer as “a kiss goodbye turned into a very gradually uncurled middle finger”. the bulk of Harry Pussy’s fanbase regarded it as something intended to confound and snub any feelings of loyalty they might have felt towards th group, in a similar way that many of Fahey’s early admirers fit distanced by his conversion to improvisation and Noise on albums such as “Womblife” and “City Of Refuge”. By daring to transplant the root of Harry Pussy’s sound (Hoyos’s vocal) and place it in a different area of music (minimalism). Orcutt had laid to rest the bones of his old group.
Any attempt by Orcutt to completely exorcise the spectre of Harry Pussy from his latest work - for solo acoustic guitar - has been only partly successful, however. While continuing the confrontational and experimental trajectory of their swansong, the minimalist curve of that final work has been replaced with a frenzied maximalism that admirers of the group will surely relate to - except that his playing on “A New Way To Puy Old Debts” sounds like no other guitar sound you`ve ever heard in your life.
Orcutt is playing a vintage acoustic Kay guitar equipped with a DeArmond pickup that he bought on the street in Gainesville, Florida, where he want to university. After the neck was broken and subsequently repaired, the guitar was downtuned so as to withstand the tension of the strings, and played with the A and D strings removed - something the guitarist has done since the 1985. Rippling with short bursts of snagging chords and skittenng notes, songs such as “My Reckless Parts”, “Sad News From Korea” and the title track have a life of their own, as Orcutt struggles to control the gush of notes and dislocated rhythm that flows from his fingers. Not every track is composed this way, however - on “Cold Ground“ the pace is less frantic and more subdued, with the guitar sections spaced apart to allow an uneasy, funereal calm.
Cecil Taylor and Canadian classical pianist Glenn Gould were also musical touchstones in the creation of A New Way. and there is a distinct keyboard element to Orcutt’s style that mirrors the precise methods of both players, as well as the player-piano compositions of Conlon Nancarrow, The influence can be plainly heard midway through “Lip Rich”. where the reverberating guitar strings against the pickup are strained to the point where they sound like TayIor’s stabbed piano keys. Orcutt adds his own voice to the mix, and his rough hollering, along with the interruption of a phone ringing and the noise of traffic outside, brings a sense of place tothe recording.
Including his voice in this way. Orcutt pays tribute to Gould who, as instructed by his music tutor mother, would sang the notes to Bach’s Goldberg Variations as he played them. Gould also decreed that “no piano need feel duty-bound to always sound like a piano”. By the way he reinvents his guitar playing here, just as Fahey reinvented his own before, Orcutt has surely taken such a dictum to heart.
Edwin Pouncey in Wire #309, November 2009
