8pm doors. $12 adv., $14 door. 21+
Release show for Bill Orcutt’s critically acclaimed new album, Odds Against Tomorrow.
As one of experimental music's most influential guitarists, BILL ORCUTT weaves looping melodic lines and angular attack into a dense, fissured landscape of American primitivism, outsider jazz, and a stripped-down re-envisioning of the possibilities of the guitar. Whether he’s playing his decrepit Kay acoustic or gutted electric Telecaster (both stripped of two of their strings, as has been Orcutt’s custom since 1985), Orcutt’s jagged sound is utterly unique and instantly recognizable, compared with equal frequency to avant-garde composers and rural bluesmen. The New York Times has called him a "powerful musician... a go-for-broke guitar improviser," and described his sound as "articulated sprays of arpeggiated chords and dissonance."
"When guitarist Bill Orcutt returned to music at the end of the last decade, he reframed his distinctive style to fit a new context. In the experimental post-hardcore outfit Harry Pussy, his playing was jagged and chaotic, with atonal shards of sound that hit like a protracted explosion. Working solo on 2009’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts, some things changed and some didn’t. Orcutt still treated notes like an action painter does colors, splattering them everywhere so that the patterns only become discernible when you take in the whole. But now he was a guy alone in a room with an acoustic, which lent the fiery compositions intimacy and made the emotional expression more direct. Ten years and several terrific albums later, Orcutt has refined his approach even further. The primary shift on Odds Against Tomorrow is to take the intensity of his earlier work and, rather than distribute the force amongst hundreds of notes, channel it into just a few. While this is Orcutt’s quietest and most lyrical solo release, it still throws off sparks. On “The Conversion Experience,” he works horizontally, probing at first, finding his footing, piling on a cluster of tones and then pulling them away as the music retreats to silence. “A Writhing Jar” touches on classical minimalism, with a hypnotic throb of strums coursing through it, which Orcutt then attacks from multiple angles. “Stray Dog” makes the record’s blues undercurrent explicit, as he bends his strings into whimpers, cries, and howls of triumph. - Bandcamp (Album of the Day)
"Odds Against Tomorrow, Orcutt’s latest solo LP, steps away from overt renditions of popular melodies and returns to a subtler investigation of folk and blues. The raw melancholy lurking in the shadows of recordings by pioneers like Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Charley Patton also hangs heavy over Orcutt’s original compositions. On his early solo releases, most notably A New Way to Pay Old Debts, from 2009, and the follow-up EP Way Down South, his mournful themes were punctuated by spasms of pentatonic runs and extemporaneous howling, giving the music a wild, unrestrained nature. By contrast, Orcutt’s playing on Odds Against Tomorrow is notably restrained and frequently threatens beauty.” - Pitchfork
PREENING
"Key players among the recent spate of jitter-itchy sax-honking oddbods out of Oakland, CA – see also The World, No Babies and Violence Creeps, for whom Preening’s Max Nordile also plays. Here, his saxophone features instead of a guitar, rather than as well as one, and leans towards lyrical, abrasive hard bop where in VC it seemed more like a blunt instrument of noise. On ‘PO Box’, track two of five on the EP, he seems to go to battle against his bandmates, bassist Alejandra Alcala and drummer/sometime music journo Sam Lefebvre, as they maintain a stout postpunk rhythm’n’chant until overwhelmed by Nordile’s slobber’n’blow. If the idea of Ted Milton’s Gloucestershire jazzpunx Blurt playing with the scorch of Lydia Lunch’s Teenage Jesus tickles you, stop dreaming and start Preening.” - The Quietus
MIKE DONOVAN (solo)
SF expat Mike Donovan (Sic Alps, Peacers) returns to the crime of the scene for a rare solo outing.
"Holed up in the far-flung Quonset of his mind, Sic Alps’ Mike Donovan is free to beam his haunted falsetto on waves of ripping feedback into the yawning spaces…" - Drag City