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Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet: Tiny Desk Concert with tags npr, npr music, national public radio, live, performance, tiny desk, tiny desk concert, tony desk, tiny concert

Lars Gotrich | April 26, 2023

"How loud can we be?" Bill Orcutt asked as his guitar quartet tuned their Telecasters and Jazzmasters for sound check. A wild deconstructionist whose catalog spans a splatter of hardcore punk, noise and electronic music, Orcutt has written and improvised on four-stringed guitars for four decades, culminating in the ecstatic minimalism of last year's Music for Four Guitars, each part played and dubbed over by himself.

At the Tiny Desk, however, Orcutt brought along a who's who of forward-thinking guitarists to perform these rowdy, giddy and shreddy pieces: Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza and Shane Parish, who transcribed the original recordings. From a frenzied hoedown ("Or from behind") and feedback-humming drone-pop ("In the rain") to something resembling Henry Cow playing Norwegian black metal ("In profile") and paradoxically Brutalist complexity ("Or head on"), each song is a short burst of finger-flicked frenzy.

SET LIST

"Or from behind"

"In the rain"

"At a distance"

"In profile"

"Or head on"

MUSICIANS

Bill Orcutt: guitar

Ava Mendoza: guitar

Shane Parish: guitar

Wendy Eisenberg: guitar

TINY DESK TEAM