6pm doors, 7-10pm show. $13/15. 21+
Hot off their smash hit appearance at Gonerfest 20!
"Bay Area guitarist Bill Orcutt and New York drummer Chris Corsano are one of the great improvising duos of our time. Orcutt has forged a powerful amalgam of blues phrasing, stabbing noise, and spindly hypnosis, extracting a titanic flow of sound that holds on to some abstract vestige of the past as it rockets into the void. Corsano is a ferocious improviser who’s built a thick constellation of associations including Akira Sakata, Mette Rasmussen, Paul Flaherty, Bill Nace, and Rodrigo Amado. But his partnership with Orcutt is something special, a collaboration that has morphed organically over more than a decade, evolving into something genuinely telepathic." - Peter Margasak
"...the sounds on Brace Up! display a constant flow of ideas and instantaneous conjugation of newly forged verbs. As great as Bill and Chris's previous duo records have been, this one's greater." – Byron Coley
"One of the world's great drummers reconvenes with one of the world's great guitarists for a spectacularly beautiful murmuration of improvised sound." -- The Guardian
BILL ORCUTT
The aggression and experimentation of Miami-based duo Harry Pussy, which featured Bill Orcutt on four-string guitar and vocals, proved to be highly influential on a generation of underground noisemakers, but Orcutt seemed to disappear after the band called it quits in 1997. The guitarist relocated to San Francisco, got a job in software engineering and went almost completely silent for the next decade and change. He reemerged in 2009 with the solo acoustic guitar album A New Way To Pay Old Debts. The overdue return was widely hailed, landing at no. 3 in The Wire magazine’s “Top 50 Releases of the Year” list and being acclaimed by Pitchfork for its “raw improvisations equally indebted to blues legends like Lightnin’ Hopkins and abstract experimenters like Derek Bailey.”
Orcutt has been on the road regularly ever since, releasing a string of solo albums on his own Palilalia imprint alongside collaborations with drummer Jacob Felix Heule, cellist Okkyung Lee, guitarist Bill Nace, Hayley Fohr of Circuit des Yeux, and Brazilian trio Chinese Cookie Poets. In 2012 he picked up the electric guitar once again, and began a raucous partnership with Chris Corsano.
CHRIS CORSANO is a New York-based drummer working at the intersections of free jazz, avant-rock, and experimental music since the late '90s. He's been the rim-batterer of choice for some of the greatest contemporary purveyors of "jazz" (Joe McPhee, Paul Flaherty, Mette Rasmussen, Zoh Amba) and "rock" (Sir Richard Bishop, Bill Orcutt, Jim O'Rourke), as well as artists beyond categorization (Björk for her Volta album and world tour, Michael Flower, Okkyung Lee). Corsano has built an inventive and highly personal musical language through ecstatic free improvisation, extended percussion techniques, and using circular-breathed reeds and bowed strings to coax new resonances out of drum heads. He's been called a "powerhouse drummer" by Rolling Stone, an "ace of the avant-garde" by The New York Times, " and "arguably the most riotously energetic and creative drummer in contemporary free jazz" by Wire Magazine.
Evelyn Davis (Chiromancer)
Detroit native and general wanderer Evelyn Davis is an inside/prepared/new music pianist, improvisor, pipe organist, composer, vocalist, synthesist, teacher, songstress, and maker of /participator in oddly shaped musics with an occasional side of performance art.
“A solid grasp of basement psych dynamism. Winding guitar riffs and stubby rhythms.” - Byron Coley