Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet: Tiny Desk Concert

Lars Gotrich | April 26, 2023
"How loud can we be?" Bill Orcutt asked as his guitar quartet tuned their Telecasters and Jazzmasters for sound check. A wild deconstructionist whose catalog spans a splatter of hardcore punk, noise and electronic music, Orcutt has written and improvised on four-stringed guitars for four decades, culminating in the ecstatic minimalism of last year's Music for Four Guitars, each part played and dubbed over by himself.

At the Tiny Desk, however, Orcutt brought along a who's who of forward-thinking guitarists to perform these rowdy, giddy and shreddy pieces: Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza and Shane Parish, who transcribed the original recordings. From a frenzied hoedown ("Or from behind") and feedback-humming drone-pop ("In the rain") to something resembling Henry Cow playing Norwegian black metal ("In profile") and paradoxically Brutalist complexity ("Or head on"), each song is a short burst of finger-flicked frenzy.

SET LIST
"Or from behind"
"In the rain"
"At a distance"
"In profile"
"Or head on"

MUSICIANS
Bill Orcutt: guitar
Ava Mendoza: guitar
Shane Parish: guitar
Wendy Eisenberg: guitar

TINY DESK TEAM
Producer: Lars Gotrich
Director/Editor: Sofia Seidel
Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin
Creative Director: Bob Boilen
Series Producer: Bobby Carter
Videographers: Sofia Seidel, Joshua Bryant, Kara Frame
Audio Assistant: Brian Jarboe
Production Assistant: Jill Britton
Tiny Desk Team: Suraya Mohamed, Maia Stern, Marissa Lorusso, Hazel Cills, Ashley Pointer, Pilar Galván
VP, Visuals and Music: Keith Jenkins
Senior VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann

#tinydesk #nprmusic #billorcutt