the flatulent motorcycle throttle/exhaust piiiipe exhales and corroborates San Francisco as the locus of the very much intimately live recording, consistent with the printed information next door to McLauglin and Santana's headlessly collaged image of the album cover.
the burping two-wheeler is an expected but unintentional intrusion on a solo acoustic guitar full-length and it manages to leave soon-fading tire tracks on the overall audibility but to the unexpected benefit of the listener. This ambient figment is welcomed into the ecology of the recording because it is a home recording recorded at home and home knows where it is and how its neighboring environment expresses itself. the idiosyncratic technique of the instrumental manipulation is profoundly manual; the pull-offs, anxious strumming and string mangling and caresses and rude slaps, seem to announce music made by hands first, artist second. at first it seems the guitar itself is the front man but this impression gives quickly way to a plethora of grips, touches, dampenings, presses, flicks and tickles that say "I am the storied hands of an artist man".
This kind of playing and this kind of music arises from an unaccompanied person spending time with their instrument every day without the interference of established pedagogues or scholastic opionions on its operation. over time a very personal style emerges, developing itself in a way in which the method and the result are singular.
The playing boasts exquisite silences where no hands can play what is being heard by the artist, but, miraculously, a focused listener can psychically tune in on the intent of the impossible passage behind the fleeting tacet; this is possible because the player's concentration is total.
How the sublime beauty of this American Raga Rock Deconstructivist-Blues thing stuck its viscous head from out the ass of South Zfloridian Znoise Zrock I do not understand.
I see contemporaries of Orcutt in the fretted executions of Rat Bastard and the late Dan Hosker, but do not assert a definite parentage or stylistic contamination thereof.
What is certain is that HARRY PUSSY are probably the best Noise Rock band ever, they were what SONIC YOUTH is assumed to be, and that the music of Bill Orcutt is valuable, American, autonomous, nonidiomatic and orphaned. what is unusual is that it is both relevant AND listenable in so many musical contexts and some how sits shoulder to shoulder inbetween Robert Johnson and Derek Bailey but doesn't recognize --and only reticently acknowledges them.