Bill Orcutt- Tupac Tattoo (2015)
Bill Orcutt- Tupac Tattoo (2015)
“Without tradition,
art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.”
Winston Churchill
By: Ghost Writer
Bill Orcutt
is simply amazing, his really unique approach to guitar playing is incredibly
original, of course, there are obvious predecessors to his unorthodox style,
people like the great late Derek Bailey (a complete master at deconstructing guitar)
mainly or Sonny Sharrock (a noise guitar precursor), but none of them got closer
to the Avant blues of Zoot Horn Rollo, the guitarist of the Captain Beefheart's
legendary Magic Band, or the way Orcutt sing the notes in the Glenn Gould style
(I heard that David Gilmour of Pink Floyd fame does the same thing).
Orcutt, for those who don't know him, started as the electric guitarist for the noise rock band Harry Pussy, a Miami band capable of channeling Yoko Ono vocal aggression, free jazz´s free will and hardcore punk bestial abrasion, it was a band that broke defiantly all molds and one that put on display the unique style of Orcutt on electric guitar, after the demise of the band, Orcutt pursued other activities until one day he decided to come back, Orcutt put aside electricity and distortion and concentrated in a way to traduce his abstract approach to acoustic guitar, little by little giving way to a bluesier groovier style without losing any of the edge of his previous recordings.
Tupac Tattoo is a new experiment in Orcutt´s career combining the daring guitar technique of Bill, his love for pure raw blues and multitrack, here, we find in each track Bill playing with himself in various songs, the record is full of amazing tunes displaying Bill's ability to create great songs out of disjointed lines of guitar and the adding here of thunderous drums returning here just a little to the guitar-drums dynamic of his Harry Pussy days, here Orcutt leaves just a little behind the guitar only works of previous albums and gives us something groovier and more rhythmic by adding drums.
There are tunes in which the guitars take the whole spot light, some of them really remind me of the great legendary guitar mystic John Fahey at his most cosmic folk mode (although he had a noisier more experimental mode), while other recordings take the blues influence to the limit and go back to the very early years of blues raw nature and researches its origins to the deep and mysterious Mississippi delta.
Tupac Tattoo doesn't sound like a completely integrated record, it sounds like a Frankenstein coming from many sources, any way is group of great and diverse tunes that in a way show a new direction for Orcutt, one that puts again Bill in the forefront as one of the great guitar experimentations and innovators of our time, Orcutt again show us that it only takes a MN acoustic, battered guitar and a mike, and perhaps a little drumming to create music that looks positively at the future, and this time, he also teach us that old time music recorded raw, pure and easy, is unbeatable by the past I time, simpler will always be better.
Orcutt, for those who don't know him, started as the electric guitarist for the noise rock band Harry Pussy, a Miami band capable of channeling Yoko Ono vocal aggression, free jazz´s free will and hardcore punk bestial abrasion, it was a band that broke defiantly all molds and one that put on display the unique style of Orcutt on electric guitar, after the demise of the band, Orcutt pursued other activities until one day he decided to come back, Orcutt put aside electricity and distortion and concentrated in a way to traduce his abstract approach to acoustic guitar, little by little giving way to a bluesier groovier style without losing any of the edge of his previous recordings.
Tupac Tattoo is a new experiment in Orcutt´s career combining the daring guitar technique of Bill, his love for pure raw blues and multitrack, here, we find in each track Bill playing with himself in various songs, the record is full of amazing tunes displaying Bill's ability to create great songs out of disjointed lines of guitar and the adding here of thunderous drums returning here just a little to the guitar-drums dynamic of his Harry Pussy days, here Orcutt leaves just a little behind the guitar only works of previous albums and gives us something groovier and more rhythmic by adding drums.
There are tunes in which the guitars take the whole spot light, some of them really remind me of the great legendary guitar mystic John Fahey at his most cosmic folk mode (although he had a noisier more experimental mode), while other recordings take the blues influence to the limit and go back to the very early years of blues raw nature and researches its origins to the deep and mysterious Mississippi delta.
Tupac Tattoo doesn't sound like a completely integrated record, it sounds like a Frankenstein coming from many sources, any way is group of great and diverse tunes that in a way show a new direction for Orcutt, one that puts again Bill in the forefront as one of the great guitar experimentations and innovators of our time, Orcutt again show us that it only takes a MN acoustic, battered guitar and a mike, and perhaps a little drumming to create music that looks positively at the future, and this time, he also teach us that old time music recorded raw, pure and easy, is unbeatable by the past I time, simpler will always be better.
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