by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
It’s a gray San Francisco day and Bill Orcutt is sitting in his office suffering questions in promotion of his recent album Four Guitars Live, released via Orcutt’s own Palilalia Records. I say “suffering” because, in an attempt to get high-level about the nature of improvisation, I’ve stepped into a quagmire of his former profession in the tech world: randomness.
Orcutt’s ability to oscillate between worlds—in one he’s a prolific guitarist and composer; in the other he’s a nascently retired software engineer—speaks to connectivity the worlds share. It’s not entirely far-fetched to imagine Orcutt writing code the way he composes and releases music, which is to say prolifically and relentlessly. If something takes a decade to finish, then that’s what it takes. But ask him about a concept like randomness without a firm grasp of what the fuck you’re talking about and be prepared to be schooled.
Thankfully, Orcutt didn’t hold my ignorance against me. The album we’re to discuss, Four Guitars Live, captures a performance of Orcutt accompanied by three other acclaimed guitarists: Ava Mendoza (a New York-based avant-garde artist who’s played with musicians as diverse as Nels Cline and Jamaaladeen Tacuma), Shane Parish (who lives in Athens, Ga. and performs in the avant-garde band Ahleuchatistas) and Wendy Eisenberg (also New York-based and a member of the band Editrix, et al.). On record, these four horsepeople of the guitar-pocalypse shred through Orcutt’s exhilarating 2022 composition Music for Four Guitars. The composition is rich in texture but also retains the care-free attitude of improvisation for which Orcutt has been known since his days in noise rock band Harry Pussy.
If you haven’t seen a performance of the concert, it’s hard to adequately explain the heaviness four guitar players achieve playing these songs in a room. Four Guitars Live balances the powerful immediacy of a composition like Glenn Branca’s “Hallucination City” with the intimacy of Orcutt’s other recordings, like his achingly beautiful album Jump On It. We caught up with Orcutt to see how this compelling composition came to be.
Here’s our discussion, lightly edited for length and clarity.
Post-Trash: We’re talking today because of the live record you did for Music for Four Guitars. How was the project initially conceived?
Bill Orcutt: My friend who had a guitar quartet challenged me to write compositions for him. And I had no idea how to do it. It took me seven years to figure it out and by that time he no longer had any use for them, so I recorded it myself.
PT: Did you write differently knowing you were composing pieces for others to perform?
Orcutt: No. I really love the Bartok String Quartets. They’re one of my favorite pieces of music. But I don’t have anywhere near the talent needed to perform them. So, the starting point was just loving these quartets and then wondering what a quartet would sound like for me. I took a long time to figure it out, but I found a process and the result was a complete surprise to me. I was like, Wow, this is different. I wonder if anyone is going to like this?
PT: You’ve made so many albums, that must’ve been cool, to get something out of this process that you weren’t expecting.
Orcutt: Yeah, it was. I kind of didn't think anyone would like it, or the records that I had made that were popular, didn't sound anything like the Quartet record. But it’s ended up being one of the most popular things I’ve done.
PT: For the live album you performed with three other incredibly talented guitar players, Ava Mendoza, Wendy Eisenberg and Shane Parish. How did you assemble the group?
Orcutt: Shane was the guy who I went to when I originally had the idea to do a transcription of Music for Four Guitars. We’d met once in Miami. I knew from seeing him online that he was really good at transcription, and I knew as a full-time musician, he was probably looking for some paid work. Then, Eva actually contacted me about playing live, and Shane knew Wendy because they’d played together in the past.
PT: I noticed you had them all play with four strings, too. Obviously, they’re all capable musicians who could have easily played the music with their standard guitar set up. What is it about removing the A and D strings that’ s important to the sound?
Orcutt: There was some discussion about that, but the dynamics are a little different. You’re able to hit that low E harder and also upstroke it in a different way if the other strings aren't there.
PT: I imagine it changes the tension in the neck a little bit? I wonder if that would affect the pitch.
Orcutt: It’s hard to say because we didn’t try it the other way. When Shane agreed to do it, I sent him a Fender Squire that was already set up with the four strings.
PT: Speaking of four strings, I read that you started playing your guitar that way after it fell into disrepair, then one day you picked it up and liked how it sounded. What role does randomness play in your music?
Orcutt: Well, it’s all random, right? I mean, the fact that you're talking to me is random. When I was growing up, we had a piano in the house. The fact that I picked up the guitar instead of the piano is random, or at least not easily attributable. People are always like, “You mean, you didn't have a scientific reason for playing with four strings?” No, not really. Not at the time. So, I mean, it was, I suppose, random, but it doesn't feel significant to me.
PT: I agree in so much that there's a ton of different causalities that come together to make some sort of predetermined moment in which your choices are limited to four strings or six. I guess what I was curious about is when you sit down to write a piece, do you start by improv-ing, that kind of randomness…
Orcutt: Do you feel improv is random?
PT: In so much as I don’t believe when you’re improvising, you’re choosing to play something predetermined. So, yeah, I do think it’s random.
Orcutt: In software engineering, randomness is a huge topic.
PT: Let’s define terms, then. What does randomness mean to you?
Orcutt: (laughs) You brought it up! What’s it mean to you?
PT: I guess what I'm trying to get at—and not doing a very good job—is asking if your music is an extension of something that you're working out in your head? Or is it something that you're just letting happen?
Orcutt: What do you think, based on what you’ve heard? With Music for Four Guitars, what do you think happened there?
PT: Well, I know you performed all four parts, so it can’t be random.
Orcutt: I guess I would say I find your question ridiculous. You can’t really simulate randomness. I worked on Music for Four Guitars for seven years, so obviously it wasn’t random. Before that, Jump On It was released on the 10th anniversary of the last time I did an acoustic record. I wanted to do an acoustic version of Odds Against Tomorrow. So, there was a specific intention there. To me the question makes no sense because randomness is impossible.
PT: As somebody who's been playing music as long as you have, does the experience change as you get older?
Orcutt: It's a good question because I don't have a ready answer for it. I guess the answer is probably yes and no. I’m flashing back to a memory I have of being in somebody’s dorm room and soloing to (Coltrane’s) A Love Supreme, and really, like, ripping it. My memory of how that felt is very similar to how it feels when I have a solo with the Quartet, that wonderful feeling of just letting loose. The part that’s different is that now I’m making records all the time for very distinct projects in all these different contexts, playing with different people. This has less to do with age than it does with what I’m doing now versus what I was doing at 22.
PT: Is there any difference in the satisfaction you get from making music now, that's different from when you were in your 20s?
Orcutt: I feel like I have more options now. I don’t have that urgency of there being all these things I need to do or say like I did when I was younger. I’ve made over 100 records. I’ve said everything I needed to say. I’m still going to continue making records. But if I stopped playing, I would be fine.
PT: That sounds like a great place to be.
Orcutt: Whatever it was, it was all fun.