Bill Orcutt

Bill Orcutt is a guitarist and composer who spent the nineties tearing through Miami's noise underground as co-founder of Harry Pussy before a decade of silence redirected him toward filmmaking. He resurfaced in 2009 on a modified four-string acoustic guitar, folding blues phrasing, free improvisation and hardcore's velocity into a style that AllMusic and The Wire both singled out as genuinely new. He now works out of San Francisco, splitting his output between solo acoustic and electric records, collaborations with players like Chris Corsano and Okkyung Lee, and Cracked, a JavaScript-based live-coding environment he built himself for algorithmic composition. His label Fake Estates exists largely to release the music that software makes possible - looping, layered pieces built from small samples and pushed through unpredictable permutation. Recent work includes The Four Louies, a mashup of Steve Reich's minimalism and the garage-rock standard "Louie Louie" performed by a small orchestra of downtown improvisers.