Bill Orcutt is a mysterious artist—our previous review hailed him as an “experimental guitar wizard”—so suffice to say his performance at Thee Stork Club this past Sunday, which featured a performance of A Mechanical Joey, left me bewildered. The second album in his “counting” trilogy, the techno-punk piece was created with Orcutt’s own Cracked computer music software, and features Joey Ramone’s voice counting from 1 to 6, cut into pieces and infinitely arranged in a staggering sonic array. It’s a heady mix of the mathematical atonal dissonance of Steve Reich or Phillip Glass mixed with the technicolor electronic mayhem of Dan Deacon.
That performance led me to the latest installment of the “counting” series out on his label Fake Estates, The Anxiety of Symmetry, from this past May. Trading out the leather jacket for something more angelic, Anxiety takes the concept into more melodic territory with six samples of female voices singing the number of the corresponding note value in the first six pitches of a major scale. The effect leaves the listener in an hypnotic trance, weaving in and out of noise and into harmony. I hope there will be more in this series, because Orcutt always keeps us guessing.
