In the late 1980s Florida's guitarists Bill Orcutt and Mark Feehan were
playing in the Trash Monkeys, whose output was compiled on
Pass Out.
Harry Pussy, that pivoted around guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer Adris Hoyos,
but also included Feehan on some recordings, put out a few singles, the album
Harry Pussy (Siltbreeze, 1995) and the mini-album
Ride A Dove (Siltbreeze, 1996).
What Was Music (Siltbreeze, 1996) collects singles and rarities.
Mostly untitled, their compositions are extreme noise
containers a` la Mars, driven by atonal guitars,
chaotic drumming and subhuman vocals.
The mini-album contains one long collage of demented experiments, sort of
a version for college freaks of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.
One Plus One (2012) compiles unreleased material from 1992-93.
After they had disbanded,
Bill Orcutt and vocalist and drummer Adris Hoyos architected the
hour-long droning symphony of
Let's Build A Pussy (Editions Mego, 1998) that signaled much grander
ambitions.
Now based in San Francisco,
Bill Orcutt started a prolific solo career as a guitar improvisor with
the lo-fi acoustic noise-deconstruction of blues music on
A New Way To Pay Old Debts (Palilalia, 2009 - Editions MEGO, 2011),
the one-sided LP Way Down South (2010), and
How the Thing Sings (2011), the latter containing the
21-minute hysterical tour de force A Line From Ol' Man River (variations on a famous showtune) as well as the tornado of The Visible Bosom.
You'll Never Play This Town Again (Load, 2008) and
Live In Austin (Sister Skull Rekkids, 2008) are live albums.
Cellist Dan Hosker died in 2012.
Harry Pussy's second guitarist
Mark Feehan devoted himself to more experimental guitar music on
MF (Siltbreeze, 2012).
The Raw And The Cooked (2013) and Brace Up! (2018) document improvisations between drummer Chris Corsano and Harry Pussy's guitarist Bill Orcutt.
Ditto the three-part Cyclone on Electric Smog (2019), a split with the Dwarfs of East Agouza.
A History of Every One (2013) revisited old classics of blues and folk
music, from White Christmas to Ballad of Davy Crockett in a
guitar style that was much closer to
Arto Lindsay and
Derek Bailey than to the
folk and blues guitarists of the past.
Some leftovers from the same sessions appeared on Twenty Five Songs (2013), a box-set of 13 7" singles, and some more leftovers appeared on Plays Songs (2015); all of them warped covers of classics.
Solo Acoustic Volume Ten (2014), recorded in an elementary school,
was an odd tribute to the "american primitive" style invented by
John Fahey 40 years earlier.
His lengthy meditations
(the seven-minute O Platitudes,
the eight-minute An Inadvertent Epic ,
the eight-minute History And Repetition ,
the eight-minute Understanding The Contemporary American Woodpile)
are deliberately played as if he didn't know how to play the guitar, with
obvious tuning "mistakes" and erratic tempos.
The album is the picaresque and transcendental version of A History of Every One.
He also released several
cassettes such as My Friends When I'm Not There (2014), Two Weeks in Another Town (2014), Daddy's Got a Spice Rack (2014), and
Gerty Loves Pussy (2014).
Some of his best inventions on four-string guitar appeared on
Road Stories (2014), a split album with Sir Richard Bishop,
for example A Genealogy of Dysfunction.
Colonial Donuts (2015) contains duets with drummer Jacob Felix Heule.
Bill Orcutt (2017) dissects classics like Star-Spangled Banner,
White Christmas and Over the Rainbow.
He used the software Cracked to craft two side-long nameless improvisations on
albums such as
Cracked Music (2016),
An Account of the Crimes of Peter Thiel and His Subsequent Arrest, Trial and Execution (2017) and
Neu Bros / OK Phone / Rural Beatles (2018).
Bill Orcutt switched to electric guitar for Odds Against Tomorrow (2019), a collection of vignettes that are both evocative and dissonant,
the unlikely meeting of Leo Kottke and Jimi Hendrix, a friendlier version of
Solo Acoustic Volume Ten
(The Sun and Its Horizon,
The Conversion Experience ,
All your buried corpses begin to speak).
Bill Orcutt
Bill Orcutt "trolled" his listeners with the three-hour
Slow Troll (Fake Estates, 2020).
Music for four Guitars (Palilalia, 2022)
is a collection of 14 brief vignettes for four guitars, an odd meeting of
Steve Reich,
Leo Kottke,
Glenn Branca and
Captain Beefheart.
The most insistent pieces, like At a Distance and
Seen from Above, fare particularly well.
From Below is possibly the most "Beefheart-ian" one.
Some of the slower ones border on elegiac folk, like In the Rain.
Out of the Corner of the Eye
Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt played on
tenor saxophonist Zoh Amba's debut
The Flower School (2023).
