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Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet

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Bill Orcutt invited three guitarists, each with their own extensive pedigrees and multi-faceted careers, to realize [m=2951005] in a live setting: Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish. With Music for Four Guitars, Orcutt focused on intricate guitar arrangement and rhythmic precision, writing shorter pieces with four multi-tracked electric guitar voices that alternately lock together and diverge into bombastic leads with accompaniments. The elevator pitch for this album would go something like “Steve Reich minimalist pieces performed by four guitarists from Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band” or “Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra compressed into four voices.” Short rhythmic phrases loop and build upon each other to form complex mosaics, all presented with a skewed harmonic sensibility that slides from more legible melodies into abrasive atonality. Hailing from Massachusetts and currently based in New York City, Wendy Eisenberg has experimented with spellbinding guitar-and-voice performance in the singer-songwriter vein, composed for large rock ensemble on their album Viewfinder (American Dreams Records, 2024), performed the guitar music of Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff, and improvised with numerous collaborators often within the scene orbiting John Zorn and his venue The Stone. They lead the post-punk / noise rock band Editrix, and recently started a duo called Whait with their partner Mari Maurice a.k.a. More Eaze. New York-based guitarist/composer Ava Mendoza’s bottomless catalog of music in small ensembles encompasses heavy rock, avant jazz, contemporary classical, blues, and virtually any style imaginable in which a guitar can be involved. She has worked with Negativland, Nels Cline, William Parker, Marc Ribot, and William Hooker, to name a few, and she released a transcendent solo album called The Circular Train on Orcutt’s Palilalia Records in 2024 that showcases her genre-colliding songwriting sensibilities and improvised impulses. Athens, GA-based guitarist/composer Shane Parish performs in the avant-rock trio Ahleuchatistas, who have released their unpredictable music on labels including Tzadik, Cuneiform, and International Anthem. His solo acoustic guitar practice, most recently featured on the album Repertoire (Palilalia Records, 2024), finds him interpreting “standards” from far-flung eras and styles of music, from Aphex Twin to Alice Coltrane — alongside a body of work of his own compositions in the experimental folk tradition. Parish teaches guitar professionally, and transcribed Orcutt’s Music for Four Guitars into a score that the band learned for their live performances.