with Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, Shane Parish, and Bill Orcutt
San Francisco-based guitarist and composer Bill Orcutt returns to Roulette to present his latest project, an all-electric Guitar Quartet, performing the music from his 2022 LP Music for Four Guitars. Featuring an all-star team of guitarists Orcutt, Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish, the group will present the music in an expanded live format that will combine intricate composition with no-holds-barred improvisation.
Bill Orcutt is the former guitarist and founder of the notorious 90’s group Harry Pussy, and his sound is a stuttered reimagining of blues guitar, weaving looping melodic lines and angular attack into a dense, fissured landscape of American primitivism, outsider jazz, and a stripped-down re-envisioning of the possibilities of the guitar. Whether he’s playing his decrepit Kay acoustic or gutted electric Telecaster (both stripped of two of their strings, as has been Orcutt’s custom since 1985), Orcutt’s jagged sound is utterly unique and instantly recognizable, compared with equal frequency to avant-garde composers and rural bluesmen. The New York Times has called him a “powerful musician… a go-for-broke guitar improviser,” and described his sound as “articulated sprays of arpeggiated chords and dissonance.”
“A rigidly structured quartet that weaves tiny rhythmic phrases into expansive tapestries, drawing on the tenets of early minimalism and New York guitar groups like Glenn Branca Ensemble.” -Pitchfork