Jimi Hendrix leads everything…even experimental music.
Talk to guitarist Bill Orcutt, who performs Saturday with his quartet at 40e Victoriaville Current Music Festival.
Orcutt, 62, discovered Hendrix as a teenager, on the small record player his parents bought him. It was a revelation. Permanently marked, he bought an electric guitar shortly after and founded his first rock groups.
PHOTO FROM YOUTUBE, PROVIDED BY BILL ORCUTT
The Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. From left to right: Shane Parish, Ava Mendoza, Wendy Eisenberg and Bill Orcutt
“Jimi Hendrix means a lot to me. In my opinion, there is no one else,” summarizes the white-bearded musician, contacted at his home in San Francisco.
Forty-five years later, Bill Orcutt has not become a guitar hero like his idol. But he has certainly established himself as one of the most interesting guitarists of the avant-garde made in USA.
Revealed within the hardcore punk band Harry Pussy in the 1990s, Orcutt gradually transformed himself into a sort of improvised guitar wizard, with his very personal blend of rock, folk and twisted blues, sometimes acoustic, sometimes electric .
Beyond the niche
His radical approach is not immediately aimed at the general public. So far, Orcutt has mainly made his name in parallel networks. But to his great surprise, the “Guitar Quartet” project, which he will present on Saturday in Victoriaville, seems to want to reach beyond the “niche” audience. “There are more people in the rooms,” he emphasizes. It’s the most popular thing I’ve ever done. I never would have believed that when I recorded the album Music for Four Guitars, but that’s how it turned out. »
Orcutt can’t put his finger on the exact reason for this success. But the fact that the pieces are “very structured”, and that there are “elements of rock”, allows the audience to have “a little more control” over the music, he says.
The Guitar Quartet does indeed have a rock side, but not only that. The looped guitar patterns overlap or interweave, forming a hypnotizing musical canvas close to repetitive music. The instruments sound like razor blades. The result is both harsh and hyper-controlled.
PHOTO LINDA CHI, PROVIDED BY FIMAV
Bill Orcutt
I see this as a mix between the album In C by composer Terry Riley and the song Sister Ray, of Velvet Underground!
Bill Orcutt
Bill Orcutt has often used acoustic guitar in the past, but for this particular project it seemed imperative to use electric guitars because they “have a more insistent sound and can’t be ignored,” he says. . “It was a conscious choice for me to have this sharper, more pointed side,” he says. I thought a lot about Captain Beefheart’s sharp guitars, which was definitely another reference for me. So that’s the direction I took. »
Without the nor
Finally, it’s difficult not to question Bill Orcutt about one of his trademarks, namely the absence of A and D strings on his instrument. This originality came to him “accidentally” in the 1980s and he has never deviated from it since, he explains. “It’s become a part of who I am. »
How does this impact his music?
It changes the sound, as if it were an effects pedal. It becomes a more percussive thing. And it makes it harder to play rhythm guitar!
Bill Orcutt
The musician points out, however, that he is not the first to play this way, citing among others the guitarist of the B52’s, Ricky Wilson, who had the habit of removing his D and G strings.
Interesting: Orcutt also imposed this constraint on the three guitarists who accompany him on stage, in order to make everything more coherent. “I wanted them to play with four strings to enter my world. And because visually, it provokes in people the same questions that you are asking me today. It’s intriguing, weird, and I like it,” he emphasizes.
Orcutt specifies that the concert will be 50% written music and 50% improvisation and that his Guitar Quartet will be completed by Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza and Shane Parish.
Notice to fans of radical rock: this 40e festival also offers a concert by the trio Bazip Zeehok, with GW Sok, former singer of the Dutch experimental punk group The Ex (Friday, May 17, midnight, Convention Center) and the “arabpsychedelic” performance of the Dwarves of East Agouza, composed of the guitarist Montrealer Sam Shalabi, Egyptian Maurice Louca (keyboards, rhythms) and American Alan Bishop (bass, sax) Saturday at midnight at the Convention Center.
Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, Saturday May 18, 5 p.m., Victoriaville Convention Center
Visit the event website