★Palilalia Records
The Circular Train
Ava Mendoza has never made an album quite as personal as her second solo full-length, The Circular Train. Through her decades of collaborations with Nels Cline, Carla Bozulich, William Parker, Fred Frith, Matana Roberts, and Mick Barr—plus years leading her power trio Unnatural Ways and playing in Bill Orcutt’s quartet—the guitarist’s name has become synonymous with virtuoso technique, raw passion, and visceral resonance, a player pushing the edges of the guitar’s possibilities. Along the way, f…
Repertoire
Restock due soon! Edition of 500 copies. Shane Parish is a member of the Bill Orcutt Quartet and Tzadik Recording Artist. Solo guitar arrangements of various jazz /avant garde/electronic/etc. tunes. Imagine: It’s sometime in the back half of the 19th century, America. You’re sitting in the parlor of your mansion, or in the only room of your shack; things are dusty and smell like sweat and hair, no matter how wealthy you may be. You don’t own a phonograph, and you don’t know who Tony Hawk is, but…
Four Guitars Live
As Bill Orcutt’s most mature and exhilarating LP to date, Music for Four Guitars was a slab of undeniable Apollonian beauty. Its approachability and obvious novelty landed it not only on the year- end lists of every key-pushing codger in the underground in 2022, but also on NPR in the form of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, an ensemble assembled to perform this music and featuring Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish. But while their Tiny Desk Concert gave a whiff of the quartet’s easy…
Recorded In Miami 1989-1991
I was hanging out with Bill Orcutt at the 930 Club nearly 30 years ago, watching a famous post-rock band (who shall remain nameless, but whose moniker contained two-and-a-half times more articles and conjunctions than nouns) when he said: 'This band is like my band in college -- all major 7th and 9th chords.' I relate this to emphasize that in the case of Bill Orcutt and Harry Pussy, the seemingly untutored ooze of 'Please Don't Come Back From the Moon' and 'Girl With Frog' had its genesis in so…
Kris Gruda Plays for You
"It's tempting to view guitarist Kris Gruda, a North Carolina resident, as part of a lineage of demented Southern avant-pickers stretching back to Chadbourne, and while that's not false, it's unnecessarily reductive. Gruda is but one particle in a contemporary wave of traveling minstrels plying the interstates and unnumbered highways of the Deep South, navigating between pickup gigs in urban centers from Asheville to Baton Rouge to Jacksonville to Amarillo, dipping into the free jazz songbook an…
Music For Four Guitars
2023 repress. "In a trajectory full of about-faces, Music for Four Guitars splices the formal innovations of Bill Orcutt's software-based music into the lobe-frying, blown-out Fender hyperdrive of his most frenetic workouts with Corsano or Hoyos. And while the guitar tone here is resolutely treble-kicked — or, as Orcutt puts it, "a bridge pickup rather than a neck pickup record" — it still wades the same melodic streams as his previous LPs (yet, as Heraclitus taught us, that stream is utterly d…
Jump On It
2023 repress; LP version. "It's been ten years since Bill Orcutt released A History of Every One (EMEGO 173CD, 2013), a compendium of hacksaw renditions of American standards on acoustic guitar -- and since ten years is a blink of an eye, you are forgiven for not immediately realizing that we've gone an entire decade waiting for Jump On It, the next Orcutt solo acoustic record. As those of us of 'a certain age' will tell you (ad nauseam), a decade is a blink of an eye containing an infinity of e…
Play at Duke
Few sounds in music are as instantly recognizable as the searching sting of guitarist Bill Orcutt and the cyclical propulsion of drummer Chris Corsano. At the same time, every single performance or recording I've heard by the duo has been markedly different, discovering new paths with a given set of tools. For more than a decade now they've been meeting up to instigate visceral sonic journeys without a map, engaging in elliptical dialogues with one another, but more often conjuring twinned excur…
The Flower School
Since exploding on the improvised music scene a couple of years ago Tennessee native Zoh Amba has found herself engaging with an ever-widening group of collaborators as she tours across the US and Europe. She's forged some enduring partnerships, working regularly with drummer Chris Corsano, bassist Thomas Morgan, and pianist Micah Thomas, among others, but one of the deep pleasures of improvised music is when a first-time meeting produces sparks. Indeed, that's certainly the case with The Flower…
You'll Never Come Back
Reissue of Harry Pussy's Ride A Dove, originally released on Siltbreeze in 1996. "By 1996, with one LP, a handful of 7"s, and a couple dozen gigs under their collective belts, Harry Pussy had thoroughly scrambled the mid-90s scuzz-rock ecosystem. Their acclaimed first LP, described by David Keenan as 'a black hole that devoured genre and flattened any attempt to classify it,' fused Japanese noise, '80s hardcore and post-Ayler jazz into a dense, white-hot ball of punk anger and insanity. The band…
Brace Up!
2023 repress. Brace Up! is the first ever studio release from the duo of Chris Corsano (drums) and Bill Orcutt (guitar). Recorded in Brussels at Les Ateliers Claus by Christophe Albertijn on March 19th and 20th, 2018. Stage dive photograph by Jason Penner. "Over the past six years or so, drummer Chris Corsano has proven to be one of Bill Orcutt's most reliably flexible collusionists. Regardless of whether Bill is cluster-busting electric guitar strings, weaseling around with cracked electronics,…
Made Out Of Sound
*2024 repress! LP version* "Sadly, many will hear Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt's latest LP, Made Out of Sound, as 'not-jazz,' though it would be more aptly described as 'not-not-jazz.' In a better world, it would warrant above-the-fold reviews in Downbeat, or an appearance on David Sanborn's late-night show (if someone would only give it back to him). More likely, we can hope for a haiku review on Byron Coley's Twitter timeline to sufficiently connect the various improvised terrains trodden by th…
Electric Guitar Duets
Limited repress, last copies! LP reissue of Land And Sea's limited 2016 tape documenting a performance by guitarists Michael Morley and Bill Orcutt at the L&S gallery in Oakland."... Once regrettable antics were permanently affixed to the rearview mirror, the pair chauffeured across the bay to Land And Sea, the cozy gallery on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland and sobered up on vegan cocktail wieners and gummie vitamins. You may doubt, you may scoff -- have fun with it, champion, seriously -- but on J…
Odds Against Tomorrow
After two albums and over half a decade spent toiling in the margins of the American Songbook, Bill Orcutt returns to original composition and the blues with his latest full-lenght, Odds Against Tomorrow. Taking its title from Robert Wise's 1959 film noir, Odds Against Tomorrow retrofits familiar folk / blues forms to the unique sound of Orcutt's guitar and the result crackles with a freshness and authority that nostalgic retreads cannot deliver. Odds Against Tomorrow is more than an expansion o…
Ride A Dove
Reissue of Harry Pussy's Ride A Dove, originally released on Siltbreeze in 1996. "By 1996, with one LP, a handful of 7"s, and a couple dozen gigs under their collective belts, Harry Pussy had thoroughly scrambled the mid-90s scuzz-rock ecosystem. Their acclaimed first LP, described by David Keenan as 'a black hole that devoured genre and flattened any attempt to classify it,' fused Japanese noise, '80s hardcore and post-Ayler jazz into a dense, white-hot ball of punk anger and insanity. The band…
Why Does Everybody Love Free Music ..
Edition of 250, few copies available. “Recorded in the US and UK 2011. Thanks to everyone who set up a show
last year, especially John Schoen, Larry Marotta, Helga Fassonaki,
Andrew Scott, Suzy Polling and Lee Etherington who made possible the
performances documented here.” Originally released on cassette in 2012
as PAL-007. Photos by R. Orcutt. "In short, almost everything you could want from a live document." Byron Coley
My Friends When I’m Not There
Edition of 250, few copies available. Recorded at Seminole Massacre Elementary, Miami FL, in the main stairwell, December 25, 2013 and originally released on cassette as PAL-028 in 2014. Photo by Jim Hensley. Mastered by James Plotkin. "A lovely contemplative performance, full of hope and sadness" Byron Coley
A Real New England Fuck Up
Previously unreleased mid-'90s live recordings of Harry Pussy in peak trio formation, with extensive eye-witness liner notes by Siltbreeze label-head Tom Lax and Tom Carter of Charalambides. Edition of 500."The 1996 Shadow Ring / Harry Pussy / Charalambides 'Rose Watson' tour. . . . There were two vans, three bands, two drivers. Tom Lax was at the helm, rationing the booze and blasting Killed By Death Volume Whatever all through the Midwest. I walked out of a gig in Ypsilanti and tripped on …
Bill Orcutt
LP version. For those not following Bill Orcutt's drift into increasingly ear-friendly orbits in his recent live sets, Bill Orcutt -- his first solo electric studio album -- shocks with its space and sensitivity. On this eponymous record, Orcutt mines the expansiveness and sustain possible on the electric guitar, letting notes spin out and decay at the edge of feedback. His pachinko-parlor pacing, marked by unraveling clockspring accelerandos crashing into unexpectedly suspended tones, is s…
Live At Various / Various Live
That guitarist Bill Orcutt & drummer Chris Corsano would play as a duo should come as a surprise to no one. As artists, both of them have bent sonic boundaries to the breaking point, especially as regards rock-based music, and they have long flowed through the same international sub-underground arteries. It was only a matter of time. The first fruit of their union was a brain melting LP called The Raw & The Cooked (2013), recorded on tour in 2012. Live at Various / Various Live is made up o…