By Guido Montegrandi
Since its release in 2022, Music for Four Guitars was one of my favourite recordings, but unfortunately I have never had the
possibility to watch and hear a live rendition of this work, so this
cassette is my occasion and I must say that it is a very good occasion.
(To be truthful, I also had another occasion with Four Guitars Live in
2024.)
My first impression reading the sequence of title of Music for Four Guitars
was that there was a story told and since in this Guitar Quartet the order
is different, some pieces are missing and two are fused together, this
cassette tells a different story.
The quartet is Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendosa, Bill Orcutt, Shane Parish (who
was responsible for the transcription of the pieces in the original work)
and their sound is really worth listening – it has a kind of raw energy and
if the studio album was on the treble side of the guitar, here the basses
are more present in the mix and the result is a sense of opening, a music
for the road.
In a small talk almost at the end of side one Bill Orcutt says:
The record’s 30 minutes, the show’s an hour so we’re improvising…
(Orcutt Banter and intros) and they are improvising but most of
all they are practicing the art of interplay at a very deep level. Many
of the pieces stay on the same time span as the studio version with just
Out of The Corner of The Eye and On The Horizon that
extend for nine and twelve minutes respectively, but these live version,
played with the help of four human beings, produce a expansive energy
field.
Another piece Barely Driving is the result of the union of two
pieces Glimpsed While Driving and Barely Visible that
shared the same riff and in the live version are fused together to create a
powerful and distorted gig-like dance movement .
Somehow this music makes me think of what David Thomas (the founding artist
of the Pere Ubu who recently passed away) said in a radio interview in 2016
(if you understand a bit of Italian here’s the link)
“rock music is the folk music of North America (…) and folk music is
traditionally based, the songs tell stories that stretches across
generations and years of life (…) and rock has to be understood in terms of
the east west journey across America, has to be understood in terms of
American geography and particularly in terms of roads…”
Now my impression is that the corpus Bill Orcutt is developing with his
Guitar Quartet and also with some of his recent works may not be what many
people would call rock but is moving in this very direction creating great
folk music for the future.
You can buy the cassette or download the music here: