BILL ORCUTT (US)

Auckland: 8pm Wednesday May 19 - w/ Brian & Maryrose Crook @ The High Seas, 12 Beresford Square. $10

Wellington: 9pm Thursday May 20 - w / The Stumps & Seth Frightening / George D Angus @ Happy, Tory/Vivian Streets. $10

Dunedin: 9pm Friday May 21 - w / Gate & Eye @ Chicks Hotel, Port Chalmers. $10

Christchurch: 8pm Saturday May 22 - w/ White Saucer & Bruce Russell @ HSP, 84 Lichfield Street. $10

Bill Orcutt emerged as one of the most influential guitar players of the 1990s, alongside drummer Adris Hoyos in the seminal Miami-based free rock band, Harry Pussy, their half-decade existence throwing up a boutique of caustic masterpieces alongside equally luminary cohorts on labels including Chocolate Monk (Richard Youngs, Incapacitants, Bruce Russell) and Siltbreeze (Charalambides, Guided By Voices, The Shadow Ring), but their volatile, calamitous sound has remained their matchless own.

Harry Pussy’s sonic wit, spat forth in vignette-like rashes such as ‘Please Don’t Come Back From The Moon’, ‘Nazi USA’ and ‘I Don't Care About Sleep Anymore’ spoke of a generational disenchantment that heavily influenced the likes of later acolytes, Hair Police, Pukers, Sightings, The Hospitals and the younger alumni on Philadelphia’s fabled Siltbreeze label. In one critic’s words, Harry Pussy ‘filtered the Circle Jerks' brutal attack through Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch and condensed it into a narrow, high-pitched assault’, and in another’s, ‘pretty much established a whole new blueprint for post-hardcore avant rock destruction.’

Orcutt’s unanticipated return with the 2009 self-released 7", ‘High Waisted’ and his late-2009 LP, ‘A New Way To Pay Old Debts’, was an exhilarating reincarnation of the rambunctious automatism and hair-trigger ferocity that pervaded Harry Pussy’s earlier, combustible missives. In Mimaroglu’s words, the latter recording ‘let loose a pan-trajectorial spray of freedom-inflected guitar histrionics, captured gloriously in a room-tone / blown-amp fidelity’. Its un-building of a noise-blues vernacular invoked the equally insubordinate spirits of the late Derek Bailey and John Fahey, and the delta bros, Fred McDowell and Joseph Spence, and was a universal, underground heir of album of the year, appearing on The Wire magazine’s Rewind list next to Oneohtrix Point Never and Broadcast.

Orcutt's plucked lacerations, spooky boogie, and ballistic extraterrestrial blues, bordered by the severe candour of his own ulterior, vocal utterances makes for an unsettling but downright melodious sound that repudiates mere descent into noise-guitar discord, while serving as a reminder to a whole contemporary pantheon of guitarists of how it should be done.