{"title":"Palilalia","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"repertoire","title":"Repertoire","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"Imagine: It’s sometime in the back half of the 19th century, America. You’re sitting in the parlor of your mansion, or in the only room of your shack; things are dusty and smell like sweat and hair, no matter how wealthy you may be. You don’t own a phonograph, and you don’t know who Tony Hawk is, but you have an inkling of how good the word 'shred' is going to feel when it enters the local slang. Suddenly, a tall, elegant figure with beautifully maintained fingernails emerges from some corner of the room, carrying a guitar. He says in a soft voice, 'I have a transmission for you, from the coming few centuries. Would you like to hear it? I figured you wouldn’t have a dongle, so I brought my guitar.' You may be apprehensive, but you shouldn’t be. Shane happens to be an internationally renowned virtuoso of the guitar. Specifically, he’s the kind of virtuoso who is as deep on style as he is on technique. His technical prowess is almost maddeningly complete; aiming paradoxically for the yards-long target called “breadth” he’s somehow hit all of it, 500 arrows piercing every pore of the landscape. He has that much technique not for the sake of guitar worship but to best bring the music forth clearly and in his own hand, like a pearl formed in a specific sea. I know this because I’ve sat next to him in multiple countries and American states and seen him deliver transmissions of that extreme honesty, with that extreme capability. Like Derek Bailey’s 'Ballads,' this record brings you into the room and the breath of a true musician whose mastery does not overshadow his appreciation of the music that inspired it. The title, 'Repertoire,' underscores the beautiful songs he chose to perform, all standards of 20th century musical excellence. The in-time persistence of his blues-walked 'Lonely Woman.' The grand registral descent he performs on 'Pithecanthropus Erectus,' like a rare document of the trip down from Everest. Dig how 'Better Get Hit in Your Soul,' emphasizes the folk blues water coursing through Mingus’s Ellingtonia, how Aphex Twin’s 'Avril 14' and the Minutemen’s 'Cohesion' sound so much older than Cage’s 'Totem Ancestors.' 'Repertoire' puts forth the idea that time is arrangement: time and arrangement are each only as successful as they are faithful to their origins and expansive in their style. Again, lest you fear the alien smoothness some associate with the concept 'virtuoso,' remember here we’re dealing with a time- traveler. His virtuosity is home grown, born of human work rather than some abstract or divine touch; the aim is not to go beyond the realm of human technical possibility but to expand it in the direction of human, meaning, timely. This guy can play anything, and for you, for this record, which sounds intimate and as present as a transmission from a time-traveler, he chooses to.\"—Wendy Eisenberg\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Palilalia","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":50417061429579,"sku":"2188911","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/getImage_77_68c18e0c_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726715388"},{"product_id":"made-out-of-sound-2","title":"Made Out of Sound","description":"\u003cp\u003eSadly, many will hear Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt’s latest LP, \u003ci\u003eMade Out of Sound\u003c\/i\u003e, as “not-jazz,” though it would be more aptly described as “not-not-jazz.” In a better world, it would warrant above-the-fold reviews in Downbeat, or an appearance on David Sanborn’s late-night show (if someone would only give it back to him). More likely, we can hope for a haiku review on Byron Coley’s Twitter timeline to sufficiently connect the various improvised terrains trodden by this long-time duo — but if you’ve been able to listen past the overmodulated icepick fidelity of Harry Pussy, it should surprise you not an iota that Orcutt’s style is rooted as much in the fractal melodies of Trane and Taylor as it is in Delta syrup or Tin Pan Alley glitz. As for Corsano, well, it may seem daft to call this particular record “jazz” (because duh, it has a drummer), but to me Corsano is beyond jazz, almost beyond music, his ambidextrous, octopoid technique grappling many stylistic levers and spraying a torrent of light from every direction. Corsano's ferocity has elevated many “mere” improv records to transcendence, but here he’s crafted his polyrhythms within more narrative channels, bringing to mind his “mannered” playing in the lamented Flower- Corsano duo. It's not “groove” playing precisely, but it follows many grooves simultaneously, much like Orcutt’s own melodic musings — which is why they’re so naturally lock-in-key here. Which maybe makes it all the more surprising that Made Out of Sound was in fact recorded in different rooms on different coasts at different times, and stitched together by Orcutt on his desktop. Corsano recorded the drums in Ithaca, NY, and (as Orcutt states), “I didn’t edit them at all. I overdubbed two guitar tracks, panned left\/right. I’d listen to the drums a couple times, pick a tuning, then improvise a part, thinking of the first track as backing and the second as the ‘lead’, though those are pretty fluid terms. I was watching the waveforms as I was recording, so I could see when a crescendo was coming or when to bring it down.” Fluidity ties the tracks together. With a little more groove and a little less around-the-beat maneuvering, one could almost hear the boiling harmonic layers as Miles-oid in “Man Carrying Thing,” but with new-found Sharrockian modalities, Corsano accentuating the tumbling nature of the falling notes. The Sharrock vein continues with “How to Cook a Wolf,” its Blind Willie-esque melodic simplicity and repetition extrapolated 360-style in a repetitive descending riff that falls into Cippolina-isms (by way of Verlaine) until the end crashes upon the shore. Much like Orcutt’s last solo album, Odds Against Tomorrow, there’s a gentler, almost pastoral flow to some tracks (“Some Tennessee Jar,” “A Port in Air,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking”) that calls to mind the mixolydian swamplands of Lonnie Liston Smith — but unlike Odds, other tracks (“The Thing Itself”) smash that same lyricism into overdriven, multi-dimensional melodic clumps that push several vector envelopes at once in an Interstellar Space vein. With the help of Corsano, Orcutt has managed to slither even further out of the noise\/improv pigeonhole lazy listeners\/writers keep trying to shove him into. Looking at the back cover of Made Out of Sound, we should not see Orcutt hurling a guitar into the air with post-punk bravado, Corsano toiling behind him in the engine room — we should witness an instrument levitating from his hands, rising on invisible major-key tendrils of melody, fired by percussion, spiraling into an invisible event horizon\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Palilalia","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50480099426635,"sku":"2217244","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"CD","offer_id":51183123923275,"sku":"2242264","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Made_Out_of_Sound_eb1004de_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727516346"},{"product_id":"music-for-four-guitars-2","title":"Music For Four Guitars","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"In a trajectory full of about-faces, Music for Four Guitars splices the formal innovations of Bill Orcutt's software-based music into the lobe-frying, blown-out Fender hyperdrive of his most frenetic workouts with Corsano or Hoyos. And while the guitar tone here is resolutely treble-kicked—or, as Orcutt puts it, 'a bridge pickup rather than a neck pickup record'—it still wades the same melodic streams as his previous LPs (yet, as Heraclitus taught us, that stream is utterly different the second time around). Although it's a true left-field listen, Music for Four Guitars is bizarrely meditative, a Bill Orcutt Buddha Machine, a glimpse of the world of icy beauty haunting the latitudes high above the Delta (down where the climate suits your clothes)...\"—Tom Carter\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Palilalia","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50480104407371,"sku":"2217212","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"CD","offer_id":51183124578635,"sku":"2242263","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Music_for_Four_Guitars_776b6837_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727516391"},{"product_id":"waterghost-songs-1","title":"Waterghost Songs","description":"\u003cp\u003eChuck Roth’s music wanders. The New York-based guitarist’s inquisitive style builds from rippling patterns that center the physicality of his instrument, roaming wherever they take him. \u003ci\u003eWaterghost Songs,\u003c\/i\u003e his Palilalia debut, collects songs from the past half-decade, presenting an intimate snapshot of his music that draws from an eclectic background in classical guitar, electronic music, and improvisation.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Palilalia","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":51146799841611,"sku":"2236297","price":31.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/roth_1296x.jpg_5615abc0_thumbnail_4096_95ad7f69-e5df-4f2c-89f3-019ef1e0e40c.webp?v=1737700315"},{"product_id":"thank-you-guitar","title":"Thank You, Guitar","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"Broadly speaking, shredders are the pro wrestlers of music, trafficking in overwrought drama but devoid of soul, the realm of finger-tappers, fretboard lubricators, and those prone to viewing music as a competitive brawl. As such, the axe-slinger of conscience steers clear of shredding behavior, albeit every-so-often dexterously running the neck to tip listeners off that, you know, they 'really know how to play.' But for the typical avant-string consumer, shredding is beyond the pale.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhich brings us to Cyrus Pireh's new Palilalia release \u003cem\u003eThank You, Guitar\u003c\/em\u003e, his latest stab at 'transcendental shred electric guitar music.' (Check out 'If I Can Play Fast Enough It Will Turn into Food and Shelter' on Bandcamp for a long-form embodiment of exactly what this means). Pireh, a self-professed anarchist and presumed enemy of music-as-sport, upcycles the 32nd-note neck sprint into a mesmeric boil played and recorded with little intervening electronic trickery other than a Digitech DD5 and mysterious amp modifications. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe end result sounds like Pireh's plugged a quarter-inch jack into each of the listener's eardrums, a quick digital delay ping-ponging across the frontal lobes, the wet and dry signal of his 9-string axe all but indistinguishable. Indeed, Pireh views his maximalist double-handed scrabble as a mirror in which the listener might visualize all manner of details in its rapidly self-propagating tonal and rhythmic tapestry. The title track, its hairpin turns echoing Fred Frith's 'Hello Music'—another startling LP-opener—establishes this methodology immediately. ('What Are We Doing What Could Be Done', another Bandcamp track, taps this same ecstatic mojo). But far from languishing in razzle dazzle, each song tracks different tangential vectors, some (like 'Free Palestine') employing tape delay to smear the sounds into a muzzy, proto-psychedelic modality, with others stretching longer feedback times into unison lines reminiscent of Eno's all-consuming Revox (albeit less pitchy). But the true mind bender of the record is 'Amen Family', its fret-tapping and string scraping reinventing the venerable amen break as an electrified freak-folk\/jungle opus for fingerstyle guitar that has to be heard to be believed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUltimately, \u003cem\u003eThank You, Guitar\u003c\/em\u003e is a giant step forward in Palilalia's redefinition of the solo guitar record, and one of the first truly novel things I've heard a guitar spit out in quite some time, milking the tension between precision and chaos, never quite veering into one or the other, but maintaining maximum engagement and brimming with action til the end.\"—Tom Carter\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Palilalia","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":51794071552331,"sku":"R8860-9716","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/getImage_6.jpg?v=1746795253"},{"product_id":"odds-against-tomorrow","title":"Odds Against Tomorrow","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"After two LPs and over half a decade spent toiling in the margins of the American Songbook, Bill Orcutt returns to original composition and the blues with his latest LP, Odds Against Tomorrow. Taking its title from Robert Wise’s 1959 film noir, Odds Against Tomorrow retrofits familiar folk\/blues forms to the unique sound of Orcutt’s guitar and the result crackles with a freshness and authority that nostalgic retreads cannot deliver. Odds Against Tomorrow is more than an expansion of the territory charted by Bill Orcutt, his eponymous 2017 studio electric debut, although it’s certainly that. With its nods to existing musics, half- step fluctuations, and near-songwriterly manipulations of tension\/release, Odds Against Tomorrow is a rock record — almost. Clearly and simply recorded through a clattering Fender Twin in Orcutt’s living room and lovingly mixed by Bay Area neighbor and pedal-steel savant Chuck Johnson, no one would mistake it for any era’s radio fodder, yet the precision of its technique and the swaying Child-ballad logic of its gentler improvisations comfortably seats it between John Mayall and Richard Thompson in your Ikea Kallax. Three songs (“Odds Against Tomorrow,” “The Writhing Jar,” “Already Old”) are multi-tracked, an innovation that, for guitar buffs familiar with Orcutt’s stripped-down vernacular, jumps out of the grooves like a Les Paul sound-on-sound excursion in 1948, or a Jandek blues rave-up in 1987. Specifically evoking John Lee Hooker’s double-track experiments on 1952’s “Walking the Boogie,” the steady chord vamps of “Odds Against Tomorrow” and “Already Old” form a harmonic turf on which Orcutt solos with lyrical abandon — and while his playing has always earned begrudging respect from any hardened shredders willing to pluck the foam out of their ear canals, even the most strident neck- strangler will steam over his lubricated runs. For the more “contemporary-minded,” “The Writhing Jar”’s crashing overdubs recall the brassy six-string voicings of This Heat or Illitch. With the exception of the unreconstructed Elmore James-isms of “Stray Dog” and the “Layla”-finale-like haze of “All Your Buried Corpses Begin To Speak,” the remaining non-overdubbed tracks dovetail snugly with Orcutt’s previous solo output, reeling gently in a Mazzacane-oid mode (“The Sun and its Horizon,” “The Conversion Experience,” “Judith Reconsidered,” “Man Dies”) or vibing up the standards (“Moon River”). On their own, these tracks would still be an important contribution to Orcutt’s canon. As part of Odds Against Tomorrow’s greater whole, they provide a through line, connecting the idiosyncrasies of Orcutt’s past explorations with the scrambled tropes of his present work. Odds Against Tomorrow challenges contemporary solo guitar practice in a way that simultaneously nullifies hazy dreams of folk purity and establishes a new high-water mark for blues-rock reconstruction. Put simply, in our current era of mannered revisionism, it is a joy to listen to.\" — TOM CARTER \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Palilalia","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":51794222186827,"sku":"R8648-7546","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/getImage_7.jpg?v=1746798426"},{"product_id":"the-four-louies","title":"The Four Louies","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1957, R\u0026amp;B singer Richard Berry scrawled a few crude stanzas on a strip of toilet paper, and chant-sung them in fake patois over a shuffling rhythm to capitalize on the Latin craze tearing up the charts. \"Louie Louie\" didn't make much of a dent in the national consciousness in its first iteration, but when Berry and the Pharaohs took the song on the road up and down the West Coast, it became something of a regional sensation. In 1962, the Kingsmen carved their mush-mouthed, barely-pubescent first take of the nascent standard into acetate. The resulting 45 was a mega-hit (although Berry remained a pauper until legal wrangling finally made him rich shortly before his death in 1997). No one could quite decipher the words, so grown-ups assumed the worst, and the resulting hysteria culminated in an FBI obscenity investigation and trial (\"Unintelligible at any speed,\" concluded the judge). The countless cover versions that followed the original hit mangled the song's blurry text into guesstimated verse with varying shades of angst and filthiness. Less than a decade later, Steve Reich's Four Organs (built from a stacked dominant-11th chord with wayward pitches gradually trickling out either side like pancake syrup) made its concert debut. Its introductory staccato fanfare poleaxed unsuspecting uptown highbrows in an almost rockist fashion, and while the piece was tolerated by the art mob, Reich's work didn't fare so well in uptown concert halls. At a Carnegie Hall performance in 1971, one listener repeatedly slammed her head into the stage, shouting \"Stop, stop, I confess!\" Nonetheless, the work's relentless progression, melting into Farfisa dreamscapes, would eventually inspire some of the most palatable manifestations of American minimalism. Bill Orcutt's latest release for Fake Estates, his ongoing opus of obsessive rearrangement, seamlessly melds these audio landmarks. Fittingly, Reich described Four Organs as \"the longest V–I cadence in the history of Western Music,\" and as such, it neatly envelops all of Louie Louie within its single chord. Intuiting this, Orcutt deftly overlays the opening salvos of these sonic cognates into a zig-zagging 4\/4 cadence, which unfolds over side one with an incongruously conventional rock dynamic structure. The Four Organs' sustained organ threads suggest Louie Louie's vocal line, whether by accident or Orcutt's design. Organ drones dominate Side 2, with Louie Louie forced into counterpoint. We can hear just how out of tune the Kingsmen were, unsalvageable by any pitch correction software, with that damned maraca inexplicably sliding into a pulsing but syncopated 6-beat bar ending with the door-slam finality of the original Kingsmen 45. Taken together, Louie Louie and The Four Organs represent key signposts in musical evolution: proto-punk, proto new age; reviled by the squares, yet efficacious in blowing forward-looking minds. In 2025, Orcutt has reinvigorated both well-worn standards with some of their old mojo, and their novel, pulsing setting provides a whiff of what made them revolutionary in the first place.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Fake Estates","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":51794224152907,"sku":"R7504-8070","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/getImage_8.jpg?v=1746798548"},{"product_id":"the-anxiety-of-symmetry","title":"The Anxiety of Symmetry","description":"\u003cp\u003e2025 repress. \"Bill Orcutt’s latest 'counting' album, The Anxiety of Symmetry, completes a trilogy on his Fake Estates label that started with Pure Genius (2020) and A Mechanical Joey (2021), all realized with his own Cracked computer music software. Comprising two 15-minute-long improvisations, the album’s terrain is limited to six samples of female voices singing the number of the corresponding note value in the first six pitches of a major scale. These are fashioned into compact phrases (1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, etc.) that are looped and layered. As the loops combine in multiple permutations and cycles, their uneven lengths create polyrhythms and syncopations as well as harmonies. On the surface, Anxiety is unusually placid for Orcutt, reminiscent of Minimal classics like the 'Knee Plays' of Phillip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach (which also features sung numbers, although without the one-to-one relationship between pitch and interval number) and the breathy soprano voice loops in '2\/1' from Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. However, the album’s title is adapted from Orcutt’s essay of the same name in the Spectres III anthology about a compulsive behavioral condition known as 'Just Right' and its parallels and possible applications to music, which suggests that this titular music’s inspiration is not trance- inducement, but rather a kind of mental obsession with ordering and re-ordering. In the essay, Orcutt posits that 'for the ‘Just Right’ subject composing or performing with the computer, the fixation with repetition, symmetry and arrangement in sound can be mediated with software, creating new prospects for both therapeutic engagement with their compulsions and the creation of music with a length, density and scale not possible without machines... Offloading one’s 'Just Right' auditory compulsions onto the computer fulfills the promise of automatic art, allowing the full expression of the subconscious by removing the need to focus on anything but the arrangement and rearrangement of elements, and the sounds themselves become merely a byproduct of the process of satisfying these feelings.' The Anxiety of Symmetry might then be comparable to artist Hanne Darboven’s quasi-Minimal compositions and their basis in odd mathematical calculations derived from the calendar, in taking its cue from an extra-musical process. The two pieces’ polyphony is not far off from Orcutt’s recent Music for Four Guitars, but also marks Anxiety as a departure from both Pure Genius and A Mechanical Joey. The latter bypassed melody and harmony altogether; its relentless, phantasmagorical looping and subdivisions of Joey Ramone’s trademark onstage count-offs could be seen as a wry comment on the repetitions within repetitions of rock songs and their ongoing performances, or simply the monomania of years of touring for months on end. Pure Genius presented a male and female voice stolidly reciting the numbers that correspond to the notes of a scale that are simultaneously generated with sine tones (i.e., when a voice says 'one,' the first note of a scale is heard at the same time); Anxiety collapses Pure Genius’ juxtaposition of pitch and counting by having the numbers sung. Stripped down yet excessive (in the tradition of his other works with Cracked), Anxiety seems less like its predecessors’ deconstructions than a new kind of subversive easy listening.\"— Alan Licht\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Fake Estates","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":51794229952843,"sku":"R3740-1037","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/getImage_9.jpg?v=1746798744"},{"product_id":"the-wigmaker-in-eighteenth-century-williamsburg-deluxe-edition","title":"The Wigmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg (Deluxe Edition)","description":"\u003cp\u003ePalilalia is proud to present this 25th anniversary deluxe reissue of To Live and Shave in L.A.'s The Wigmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg in an expanded 4LP box set. The four LPs contain all 27 tracks from the original Wigmaker double CD remastered for vinyl, including complete lyrics, original liner notes and production credits, plus an entire LP side of unreleased songs from the original 1996 version of the album. The set also includes a 36-page perfect-bound book with never- before-seen photos, a critical appreciation by Matmos’ Drew Daniel, and a 10,000 word oral history of the five year period 1995-2000 that bandleader Tom Smith worked on Wigmaker, including interviews with the band, the label, the many guest musicians, and friends and co-conspirators like Aaron Dilloway, Jim O’Rourke and others. \"A gloriously hostile masterpiece whose time has come... The product of five years of jamming, equipment mooching, couch- surfing, and marathon self-editing, the record is at once supremely out of control and structured to the tiniest detail.\"— Drew Daniel \"An ambitious marriage of ass-shaking rock dynamics, hard disk manipulation, ‘sound on sound’ concrete architecture and industrial strength electronics... Intellectually savage\"— David Keenan, The Wire \"A truly great album... totally convinced of its own necessity and complete in its absurdity. From the perplexing cover art to its utterly indigestible length, there is no wink or nudge to suggest this is an elaborate put-on, no window left open to the real world... 8.5\"—Jason Nickey, Pitchfork\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Palilalia","offers":[{"title":"4LP - Black","offer_id":51794246926667,"sku":"R3019-4029","price":184.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/getImage_10.jpg?v=1746798941"},{"product_id":"another-perfect-day-1","title":"Another Perfect Day","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003eAnother Perfect Day\u003c\/em\u003e is Bill Orcutt's first solo electric guitar record since 2017’s eponymous \u003cem\u003eBill Orcutt.\u003c\/em\u003e While that eight-year gap might not seem like a ton of time on the cosmic scale, it nonetheless represents a busy half-decade plus for Orcutt projects: a raft of improv collaborations, an acclaimed run of chopped and looped albums on Fake Estates, and the collision of Orcutt's computer and guitar music on \u003cem\u003eMusic For Four Guitars \u003c\/em\u003eand last year's How to Rescue Things, both on Palilalia. The undeniable alchemy of those latter mashups inspired not only a wider appreciation of Orcutt-as-composer, but also the resurrection of Orcutt-as-bandleader, as the Bill Orcutt Quartet hit the road in support of Four Guitars, Orcutt's first work with a proper score (courtesy of Shane Parrish).\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAll of the above makes 2025 the perfect year to reacquaint ourselves with Orcutt-as-solo-performer, wielding his trademark four-string rather than a mouse, running the neck rather than shuffling waveforms, blasting through Cafe Oto's tattered Fender Twin (the cover model for the aforementioned How to Rescue Things) rather than a pair of ancient NS-10s. Indeed, this 2023 performance at Oto, East London's finest music establishment, boomerangs back into the slashing chords and frenzied double- picking of the Harry Pussy years, tossing the gentler melodic glow of the last few solo records into the dustbin.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn other words, this may be Orcutt's most overtly punk-rockist record since Gerty Loves Pussy, his first solo electric LP from a decade ago. It's an affirmation that Orcutt is above all a lead player—angular runs scaling the heavens, ricocheting back to ground zero before climbing again. Orcutt builds tension with short phrases, repeated with slight variability until it seems like they’ll never stop, finally slamming into a fresh line like the dawning valley at the crest of the mountain pass.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003eAnother Perfect Day\u003c\/em\u003e is, ultimately, something of a solo guitar Nouveau Roman, an exhilarating run through melodic reiteration, impossible crescendos (check out those ecstatic crowd hoots on \"For the Drainers\") breaking into—a moment rarely found on an Orcutt record—soft, whisper-quiet tracer notes at the end of \"A Natural Death.\" Another Perfect Day returns Orcutt to the immediacy of his earliest records while maintaining the melodic complexity, phrasing, and flow of a player, who's been going, what—four-plus decades now? And when he taps his roots, it's a reminder of exactly what was so exciting about Orcutt's playing in the first place.\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Palilalia","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":53543710294347,"sku":"R8488-9946","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"CD","offer_id":53543710327115,"sku":"R8488-8565","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/a1069427903_16.jpg?v=1759757550"},{"product_id":"autechre-guitar","title":"Autechre Guitar","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"UTF-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThis record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIt’s not just that Autechre’s music is electronic and Shane Parish’s is acoustic. It’s not just that Autechre come from electro and techno, while Shane’s solo guitar music is rooted in jazz, folk, and the blues. Those borders, between mediums and genres, are as porous as you want them to be. But Autechre are synonymous with difficulty, opacity, inscrutability—known for unparseable rhythms, cryptic riffs, and shapeshifting timbres. Even on their early records, before they’d begun building out the mind-bending software systems that have defined the past quarter-century of their music, the duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown were working at the very limits of their machines: eking melodies out of drum sounds, programming intricate polyrhythms of superhuman complexity, and writing sequences that defy attempts to decipher them. I’ve been listening to “Yulquen” for 31 years, and I still couldn’t tell you just what is happening between the melody and the beat; try as I might, I simply can’t count out the steps.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eNow take Shane: one guy, one guitar, two hands. Six strings. Ten fingers. (Throw in a tapping foot for when the timekeeping gets tricky.) That’s the sum total of what he’s working with\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"bcTruncateMore\"\u003e. These are not the kinds of tools you’d think would be equipped for Autechre’s music. But if anyone could take on a project like this, it’s Shane. Informed by his years spent playing standards as a working musician in supper clubs and resorts around Asheville, North Carolina, he’s been arranging music for solo fingerstyle guitar for decades—much of it material originally written for and recorded on other instruments. On his astonishing 2024 album Repertoire, he tackled songs by Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Alice Coltrane, and even Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin, zeroing in on the essence of each and rendering it into his own sure-footed yet exploratory style.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe origins of \u003cem\u003eAutechre Guitar\u003c\/em\u003e run deep. Last year, Shane posted a low-key nylon-string performance of “Slip,” recorded in his living room, on YouTube. But his first attempt at the song was actually way back in 2004, when he notated his first rudimentary transcription of its serpentine melody—a 29-beat phrase that seems to slip and slide over a 4\/4 pulse, to subtly unsettling effect. He had returned to the song over the years, with a vague idea of eventually doing something more with it; finally, after Repertoire’s Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin covers—and with the urging of his wife, a die- hard Autechre fan—he decided to try his hand at an entire album of Autechre covers, and sat down to begin notating songs, one by one. Puzzling out the sequences. Arranging the counterpoints. Translating shades of pewter and graphite into something resembling a 12-tone scale. And, most importantly, finding ways to distill Autechre’s seemingly limitless details in ways that could be played by just 10 fingers without losing the soul of the song. It was, in essence, a kind of sleight of hand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe material on\u003cem\u003e Autechre Guitar\u003c\/em\u003e is drawn entirely from the 1990s—specifically, from the albums Incunabula (“Maetl,” “Eggshell,” “Bike,” “Lowride”), Amber (“Slip,” “Nine,” “Yulquen”), Tri Repetae (“Eutow,” “Clipper”), and LP5 (“Corc”). The reason is simple: That’s the melodic golden age of Autechre, when Booth and Brown were writing hooks that would go down as some of the most enduring, and emotionally satisfying, in the past three decades of electronic music.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShane has done a remarkable job of capturing those melodies and translating them for the steel strings of his Taylor 214E-G. Anyone who knows Autechre’s “Bike,” a dreamy highlight of their debut album, will instantly recognize the melody Shane has pulled out of it, high notes drizzling down like raindrops on the windshield while octaves in the bass swish back and forth, steady as wipers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut what I find even more fascinating are the examples where the connection isn’t so clear. Where the melody in the original song isn’t so obvious, say—like “Clipper,” with its droning pads and rigid bursts of arpeggio, or “Corc,” with its gamelan shimmer and open-ended riffs. “Eutow” is another one that stops me in my tracks every time: How on earth did Shane get from the original’s smear of supersaw pads, arcing glissando, and whipcrack electro beat to what he gives us here: a somber, Faheyesque report from the depths of solitude? Or just listen to “Nine,” whose portamento attacks he turns into pitch-bent blue notes straight out of the American South. (The album version of “Nine” is actually the original demo recording Shane made of the song; it’s the only take where he feels like he really captured the magic of that song.) Listening to Shane’s versions of these tracks, you intuit the way he’s had to reach deep inside each song, working by feel alone, to grasp its contours and come back with something that communicates its ideas, even if it sounds all but unrecognizably different.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUltimately,\u003cem\u003e Autechre Guitar\u003c\/em\u003e works on multiple levels. It’s a celebration of Autechre’s music, shining a spotlight on the durability and flexibility of their songwriting. At the same time, it’s an invitation to listen deep inside the music, to take part as active listeners in the process of translation and interpretation. And while it hardly needs to be said, it’s an invitation to simply get lost in Shane’s astonishingly fleet playing, which takes these songs of unfathomable difficulty and makes them seem practically effortless.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Palilalia","offers":[{"title":"2LP - Black","offer_id":56134543311179,"sku":"R3634-3514","price":46.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":56134543343947,"sku":"R3634-7756","price":21.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/a0786735092_16.jpg?v=1765976528"},{"product_id":"music-in-continuous-motion","title":"Music in Continuous Motion","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMusic in Continuous Motion\u003c\/em\u003e, Bill Orcutt’s latest entry into his 21st-century repertoire of quartet guitar music, pointedly steps away from the cut-and-paste constructivism of Music for Four Guitars into a sonic stratum that's yearningly melodic, resolutely human, and built for performance. Conceived for a 2026 NYC concert, \u003cem\u003eMusic in Continuous Motion\u003c\/em\u003e shares the concision of its predecessor—but rather than the discrete, mechanistic precision of Music for Four Guitars, the tracks on \u003cem\u003eMusic in Continuous Motion\u003c\/em\u003e unify—each song weaving four gleaming threads into the warp and weft of an evolving, complex texture that employs simple, repeating motifs to build new melodies from counterpoint itself. It accomplishes this in the most efficient manner possible: most of these 12 tracks hover around two-and-a- half minutes, each iterating first the substrate, then the melody and its variations, then slamming shut like a clockwork music box.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBased on previous recorded evidence, Orcutt is fond of boundary conditions for his studio guitar records. Much of the time, his launchpad is obvious (The Four Louies, How to Rescue Things); with others, it’s intentionally obscured. When recruiting me to write about each release, he might send me a clue (“This is a bridge pickup record more than a neck pickup record,” Orcutt helpfully offered for Music for Four Guitars). Although any given dispatch is a potential red herring, up until now, each has implied an Oulipian conceit (however obtuse) that at least somewhat determines the outcome. Thus, I was a bit surprised by his statement on \u003cem\u003eMusic in Continuous Motion\u003c\/em\u003e—“The mystery of how [the] same person, same process, same gear produces different results.\" When pressed, he elaborated that the record features “no triplets,” something I’ve yet to count out to determine for myself.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhatever overarching form the recording process may have mapped out, the path of the finished album is explicitly poetic. Echoing its predecessor, the song titles, read in sequence, paint fleetingly-glimpsed forms—but in contrast to the distant shapes described in Music For Four Guitars, the present narrative spotlights the dance of polygons momentarily grasped (and then lost) as they spin through space: “Because sharp also smooth,” “And warm to the touch,” “Now nearly gone,” “Yet always moving,” “Impossible to reach.” Ultimately, the key difference between the albums (and what places \u003cem\u003eMusic in Continuous Motion\u003c\/em\u003e in the realm of poetry) is its celebration of movement over immutability, of melody over form, of music as a hot wire to the heart rather than another upped ante in an arms race of inscrutability.—Tom Carter\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Palilalia","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":56504200921419,"sku":"R9257-8197","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":56504200954187,"sku":"R9257-1590","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/unnamed-2026-02-12T120134.357.jpg?v=1770897700"},{"product_id":"youll-never-play-this-town-again","title":"You'll Never Play This Town Again","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"UTF-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLimited double-LP version of the 2008 CD originally issued on Load, compiling the best live and studio recordings by the final iteration of this group. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e60 second bursts of chaotic rock 'n' roll that barbarize whole histories of freakout style, from free jazz through classic hardcore, boogie, blues, Black Flag, Germs, most explicitly through Beefheart, but all hyper-condensed into ultra-kranky riffs that Orcutt plays at hallucinatory speed, compressing Zoot Horn Rollo style avant confusion into lighting runs and metallic two note knock-outs. Hoyos’ style is so primitive that it's wildly avantgarde, with an instinctive feel for time that confounds the most advanced improvisatory strategies with the most hysterical. And her vocals are post-Yoko in the truest sense, not directly informed by her but sharing the same spontaneous energy and a-musical appeal, sometimes breaking from songs completely to expand on barely articulated vocal rants and fever pitched bouts of screaming. The whole group existed in a zone that was constantly beyond technique. The arc of their career was perfect, the mission truly accomplished, and all that's left is this amazing series of recordings, a body of work that has had a disproportionate effect on the minds, if rarely the actual sound of the underground.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Palilalia","offers":[{"title":"2LP - Black","offer_id":56717325599051,"sku":"R8322-8667","price":48.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/2000x2000bb_fa105907-65e4-4ff9-9e8f-1177bdd87a46.jpg?v=1772875990"},{"product_id":"fuzzy-logic-1","title":"Fuzzy Logic","description":"\u003cp\u003eGerman guitarist Olaf Rupp combines elements of traditional flamenco (rasgueados, arpeggios, picados) with the fractured cadences of Derek Bailey, fusing them together with a blast-furnace tone recalling John Lee Hooker's most blown-out extremes. And yet, despite decades of concerts and releases on FMP and Emanem, often with marquee-grabbing collaborators like John Zorn, Peter Brötzmann, Butch Morris, Paul Lovens and Lol Coxhill, Rupp's music is largely unknown outside of European free improvisational circles, and (until now) has never been presented on vinyl.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOver its four double LP sides, \u003cem\u003eFuzzy Logic\u003c\/em\u003e sounds like a Guitar Solos-era Fred Frith musing on Jandek or Carlos Montoya essaying the music of Cecil Taylor, veering from unadorned yet forceful exclamations into torrents of austere, alien gestures packed with modal angst (a rarity in the capital-I Improvisation world), rewarding careful listening with previously unexplored microlandscapes of impossibly interlocked waveforms.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRegarding the album's unique sound, Rupp writes, \"Echtzeitmusik-people\" -- referring to the most strident non-idiomists of the Berlin improv scene -- \"will once again nag at all those minor chords and the indie rock fans will shake their heads in vain looking for the beat. But unrootedness is also a power, a gift, a way.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIndeed, \u003cem\u003eFuzzy Logic\u003c\/em\u003e is powerfully unrooted. But most strikingly, it tracks Rupp's autodidactic turn into the fraught world of effects pedals. These days, soldering-iron jockeys produce an absurd array of signal processing tools, from bit crushers to tone benders, lo-fi loopers to 24-bit digital arpeggiators, all designed ostensibly as creative tools but more often marketed towards lazy players plying YouTube gear demos rather than pushing their boxes past the limits.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFuzzy Logic\u003c\/em\u003e, rather, beelines to the tone-smearing outer limits of overdrive, eschewing the well-trodden paths of wail, feedback and sustain to produce a rainbow spray of strange overtones, self-oscillation, and whispered notes beyond the reach of human touch. Tracks like Hundsrück Forest throw the electronics into sharp relief, subtly blending frozen hisses into a larger grid of crackling overtones before bursting into insistent atonal repetition.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePowered by a small amp driven by an attenuator which allows maximum blow-out tone at low volumes (combined with a subtly-coaxed sound-stretcher and loop pedal), Rupp amplifies mercurial sonic details into liminal territories typically unexplored by players chained strictly to skin-on-strings. In tandem with the tech, Rupp's singular finger-charge remains. For Rupp, a cluster of fast-moving notes should be considered \"one agglomerated sound in motion… using spectralistic fields of tones.\" Accordingly, every track is packed with motion and color.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn a way, \u003cem\u003eFuzzy Logic\u003c\/em\u003e echoes Palilalia's previous forays into the exquisitely fried spectrum of electric guitar exemplified by some of Bill Orcutt's records, but more pointedly by Cyrus Pireh's jaw-dropping explorations of speed-runs skittering through grainy distortion. But unlike Pireh, and unlike anyone else you'll likely conjure up, Rupp's work (despite its virtuosity) taps a primal throb dripping with eldritch and unspeakable menace, that punches through the buttery intellect to throttle the brain stem -- particularly at top volume, which is exactly how you should bathe in \u003cem\u003eFuzzy Logic\u003c\/em\u003e to fully experience its torrential majesty. — TOM CARTER\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Palilalia","offers":[{"title":"2LP - Black","offer_id":57228718833995,"sku":"R3969-6682","price":47.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/unnamed-2026-05-06T143628.361.jpg?v=1778074603"},{"product_id":"colonial-donuts","title":"Colonial Donuts","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eGuitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer Jacob Felix Heule (ettrick, Fred Frith, Sult) have been performing regularly around the San Francisco Bay Area since 2012, but this is their first release together. Recorded in Orcutt's living room in the early months of 2015 and named after a chain of Oakland coffee shops, \u003cem\u003eColonial Donuts \u003c\/em\u003ecollects 13 compact, stylistically diverse duets for electric guitar and drums, ranging from hushed, socially anxious folk to sprung electric blues to dense, pummeling free improvisation. Mixed by Frank Falestra at Dan Hosker Studios in Miami Beach; mastered by James Plotkin; designed by Bill Orcutt.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Palilalia","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":57375953584459,"sku":"R3425-4333","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/2000x2000bb_cce4bd48-ce83-4295-b0d1-780f37c3c7a8.jpg?v=1779191305"},{"product_id":"brace-up","title":"Brace Up!","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"UTF-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBrace Up! is the first ever studio release from the duo of Chris Corsano (drums) and Bill Orcutt (guitar). Recorded in Brussels at Les Ateliers Claus on March 19th and 20th, 2018. \"Over the past six years or so, drummer Chris Corsano has proven to be one of Bill Orcutt's most reliably flexible collusionists. Regardless of whether Bill is cluster-busting electric guitar strings, weaseling around with cracked electronics, or playing relatively spacious free-rock, Corsano is able to provide the proper base for his aural sculpting. A lot of Orcutt's instrumental work has traditionally felt hermetic even though he's exploring caverns of explosive ecstasy. One often got the impression Bill was operating in the way John Travolta did in the classic 1976 ABC television drama, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. Orcutt's actual interaction with collaborators emerged not from communication so much as pure observation. While he was fully cognizant of his musical surroundings, his reactions to it were walled off. This approach did not encourage sonic dialogue so much as parallel streams of discourse. These streams could interact with each other, but not in particularly standard ways. On\u003cem\u003e Brace Up! \u003c\/em\u003e, their first ever studio release, this precept has changed considerably. Whether it's a function of emotional familiarity or an intellectual choice I dunno, but there's a whole new kind of duo exchange going down on this record. Bill and Chris are clearly playing off each other's moves throughout the album. And it really raises the level of the music to an all-time high. From the cop car see-saw of 'Poundland Frenzy' to the mutual pummeling of 'Paranoid Time' (possibly a Minutemen tribute?) to the lazychicken- gets-stung-prog of 'She Punched a Hole in the Moon for Me,' the sounds on \u003cem\u003eBrace Up! \u003c\/em\u003edisplay a constant flow of ideas and instantaneous conjugation of newly forged verbs. As great as Bill and Chris's previous duo records have been, this one's greater.\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Palilalia","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":57376042680651,"sku":"R3651-1913","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/A10369V0000000857U_T43922858250054.jpg?v=1779191503"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/collections\/palilalia-2.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}