Fifty feet of wire, miked at both ends, passing through the poles of a large magnet, set vibrating four times at four different frequencies, in complex, evocative, ethereal chords.
Superb, refined soul music, mostly written in the Brill Building (including a bunch of Bacharach & Davids), originally issued by Big Top in New York.
Shades Of Blues (1965), Dusk Fire (1966), Phase III (1968), Change Is (1969), and Live (1969).
Just one!
Karuna Khayal runnings from 1975. ‘Orchestrated fuzz guitar, echo-drenched percussion, reverbed bass, zithers, assorted taped sounds and vocals that are simply inspired… a must for devotees of Faust and Can.’
Plenty of prime Upsetters here.
‘Returns to original composition and the blues… with a freshness and authority that nostalgic retreads cannot deliver… 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. 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 or vibing up the standards (Moon River)... 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” (Tom Carter).
‘What really impressed was its precision, its 14 guitar miniatures bringing to mind the cascading melodies of Steve Reich, or Malian kora music… There’s so much going on in these dense constructions, you’re likely to hear new layers and combinations with each spin’ (The Wire, Releases Of The Year).