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The latest work for four guitars by the Miami-born musician and composer sounds like a history lesson in guitar technique to Bernie Brooks<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
This year, in our garden, we leaned hard into winter interest. Across the sixteen or so beds and borders in our small, suburban plot of land in Metro Detroit there are great, golden-brown bunches of bloodletting sawtoothed grass taller than me; dense knee-high rip curls of spent aster \u2013 under which a three-legged neighbourhood tabby cat overwintered; shocks of wheat and feathered grasses (less dangerous than their sawtoothed brethren). There are patterns and rhythms to all of this. The way stalks overlay stalks, the spirals of twined bundles made stubbornly strong to withstand cutting winter winds.<\/p>\n
I am making room for spring in the east-facing bed that runs alongside the very large shed or very small barn that sits in the southeast corner of our yard. The bed is perhaps three feet deep and about eighteen feet long. In season, it contains luminous orange Mexican sunflowers that stretch taller than the shed, to maybe fourteen or sixteen feet. Woody and tough, their stems held nutty brown seedheads aloft nearly all winter \u2013 until shearing sixty-mile-per-hour gusts bent them at the knees. With yellow Niwaki secateurs in my foolishly ungloved right hand, I am making patterns and rhythms of my own, with my limbs and the stems, working in time to the music in my headphones. Bill Orcutt\u2019s four interlocking, chiming guitars loop rhythmically as I decisively cut each stem at the base, pull it free with my left hand, and sort of lob the whole thing into an orderly pile behind me.<\/p>\n
There is a kind of fixed-gear, cyclical perpetuity to Music In Continuous Motion<\/em> that makes it particularly well suited to this kind of work. On a fixed-gear bike, you pedal to get going, but once you\u2019re going, the pedals never stop. So, you keep pedalling because, well, the pedals are already going, which only makes them move faster. So, you pedal faster, and on and on until you work against the pedals or jump off the bike. Method of creation notwithstanding, this is how Orcutt\u2019s new batch of compositions sounds and feels. As if by starting to play, his playing perpetuated playing, and could have done so ad infinitum, unless actively stopped. Couple this with a bright guitar tone that suits the sun and a briskness that suits the March bluster, and you\u2019ve got an album that suits a moving body out in the world.<\/p>\n