Orcutt, Bill

2025 repress. "Bill Orcutt is of course famous for his bluesy free improv acoustic guitar playing, which he has been performing since he re-emerged with the 2009 solo album A New Way To Pay Old Debts, 12 years after the dissolution of his seminal noise rock band Harry Pussy. He has also held down day jobs as a software engineer at various Silicon Valley companies for the last two decades.

Apart from certain errant excursions such as Harry Pussy’s final album Let’s Build A Pussy, which consists of Orcutt timestretching a second of the voice of Harry Pussy drummer Adris Hoyos into an hour, and notwithstanding the fact that since 2011 his albums have been released by electronic music label Editions Mego, there was previously a marked divergence between the computers of Orcutt’s career and the eschewal of digital manipulation in the uncompromisingly visceral playing of his vocation, in which the pluck of every string is palpable. This changed in 2016, when he released the avowedly primitive open source live coding audio program Cracked, which consists only of a window in which commands are typed.

Since then, Orcutt has been intermittently releasing music made with the app on his DIY label Fake Estates, A Mechanical Joey being the latest. Its two sides comprise one continuous track, lasting 35 minutes in total, during which Orcutt creates the illusion that a sample of Joey Ramone counting in a song accompanied by drumbeats is moving forwards and backwards in space. It is a sequel of sorts to last year’s Pure Genius, another release by Orcutt made on Cracked, which consists of various computer generated voices counting, accompanied by bleeps ascending the chromatic scale. The blurb for that record claims that it was borne of the fact that 'while stuck out on the left coast surrounded by braying tech bros,' Orcutt 'realized that we, the plebs, will eventually be here only to serve the machines'. But perhaps the return of the human

voice on A Mechanical Joey is his indication that we might be able to resist after all.”—Daniel Neofetou, Wire