Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet Wrest Melody Out of Noise

“We’re playing this music that I made on a record called Music for Four Guitars,” says Bill Orcutt in between songs on HausLive 4. “That record is 30 minutes; this show is an hour, so we’re improvising.” Orcutt‘s matter-of-fact explanation is admirable in its self-deprecation, but the music that comes before and after those words is thunderous, menacing, and revelatory.

The Miami-born, San Francisco-based guitarist, who gained notoriety in the 1990s with the influential noise band Harry Pussy, has been releasing odd (and oddly moving) instrumental guitar albums for the past several years. His 2022 record, Music for Four Guitars, featured Orcutt multitracking himself through a series of rigidly structured musical phrases, all with a distinctly sharp tone and bits of distortion-fueled riffs. HausLive 4 brings that project to an audience with spectacular results.

Recorded on 3 May 2024 at the experimental-tilted Chicago venue Constellation, HausLive 4 is the latest in a series of audience-recorded live albums from the Hausu Mountain label (volumes one through three featured, respectively, Sunwatchers, Goodwill Smith, and Moth Cock). This particular release, recorded by the “prolific Chicago taper and HausMo mega-friend” Joel Berk, includes Orcutt and fellow guitarists Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish.

HausLive 4 by Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet

As Orcutt states in the above-mentioned between-song banter, the four musicians take the basic tenets of those earlier compositions and often add bits of improvisation, occasionally lengthening the tracks. “Out of the Corner of the Eye” is the most blatant example of the musicians testing the boundaries of the source material, with the original two minutes stretching out to a little more than nine.

Most of the music is jagged edges mixed with a sense of minimalism and repetition reminiscent of Steve Reich. There are bluesy runs and metallic lunges, but the execution seems very much rooted in punk (or post-punk). Orcutt’s three fellow conspirators have combined experience in heavy rock, avant-jazz, contemporary classical, blues,folk, and various forms of experimentalism. Clearly, they understand this music and what’s required to pull it off.

While album opener “A Different View” presents the quartet in strict interlocking grids of noise and notes, “Seen From Above” adds a blues-oriented shuffle to the mix, and “In the Rain” includes ringing notes of indie rock. While the music embraces common themes of noise and counterpoint, there are flurries of melody that end up as ragged but instantly gratifying earworms. Fans of Captain Beefheart can appreciate the “beauty within the chaos”, not to mention that the sonic fingerprints of late-period Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas are all over this.

HausLive 4 steps out of the quartet format for a few minutes with the self-explanatory “Bill Solo”, a gorgeous piece by Bill Orcutt that recalls his pre-quartet solo guitar explorations, lyrical with the right amount of subversiveness (and moments of lo-fi quiet where you can hear the occasional squeak of chairs). However, mostly, HausLive 4 is a four-part machine of noise, distortion, and transcendent beauty, from the brutal assault of “Barely driving” to the ugly, monster groan of “From below” to the multifaceted dronings of “On the Horizon”.

HausLive 4 is an acquired taste, and anyone not particularly interested in hearing four electric guitars simultaneously pounding out inspired, amplified noise should probably stay away. Still, noise rock fans who yearn for the sound of a quartet at the absolute peak of their powers will gain a great deal by scooping this one up.

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