It’s the 10th anniversary of my Fake Estates imprint and to mark the occasion I’m reissuing three titles: “A Mechanical Joey,” “The Anxiety of Symmetry” & “The Four Louies.” First time reissues for anything on the label. They’ll be on Bandcamp and available for distribution (another first!) from Revolver USA beginning in May.
Also in May, I’ve got two West coast performances of “The Four Louies” — that’s LIVE shows with a twelve piece band & me on guitar. We got some of SF’s brightest lights for these premiere performances AND legend William Winant (who performed “Four Organs” in Reich’s touring ensemble back in the day) to jam maracas. Insane. Shows are Friday May 30 in Los Angeles at Zebulon (presented by Upend LA) and Saturday May 31 in San Francisco at the Lab.
PAL-090 To Live and Shave in L.A. 4LP box set
“The Wigmaker in Eighteenth- Century Williamsburg.”
Palilalia 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 & 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.
It ships April 10th 2025 on what would have been Tom Smith’s 69th birthday.
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
Vinyl represses of Music for Four Guitars, Odds Against Tomorrow, Four Guitars Live & How to Rescue Things are available and on the Orcutt bandcamp now. CD versions of Made Out of Sound, Music Four Guitars, Four Guitars Live & Jump on It are bandcamp too. They’re also available for mail order & distribution at Midheaven / Revolver USA.
Chuck 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. watergh0st songs, 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.
The mark of watergh0st songs is its exploratory nature. Roth began his musical journey as a classical guitarist studying the canon works for the instrument, but he was never interested in playing fast or flashy. Instead, he wanted to roam down musical paths and see where they led him. He eventually became more interested in electronic music, where he found inspiration in subtractive properties and patterning. The music of watergh0st songs translates that electronic music to the guitar: many of the songs began as synth tones and later branched out through the physicality of his instrument.
When writing music, Roth wants melodies to feel comfortable in the body, focused less on setting a structure and more on letting music unfold how it happens in any given moment. His songs are fluid and his melodies are clear, plucked with careful attention but never too deterministically. His is the music of a traveler, floating around the strings of the guitar. It is about embracing the banal, or the everyday moments that shape a life.
Though Roth’s music often feels quite direct, there is a dreaminess that lives inside of it. His lyrics don’t feel too hot or cold, instead they have a wistfulness and melancholy of what it feels like to live through every passing day. His exploratory style bolsters these lyrics, giving the music its sense of ennui, as does his focus on texture. Each track takes on a different structure: “Bunny Hop” unfolds like a squirrel jumping from branch to branch of a tree, while “Private Boy” has a slower approach, growing from delayed harmonics that almost sound like bowed strings. His textures range from metallic and bristling to soft and feathery, evolving with gentleness. It is about ending up somewhere different than where it started, and watching the notes that fall in-between.
The embrace of the routine colors Roth’s music. In it, there is a sense of presence, of admiring the smallest details and moments. Roth loves to take walks and look around, observing the beauty of his surroundings. Similarly, watergh0st songs feels like moving through the world at the pace of a comfortable trot and soaking in every sound as it emerges. It is a quiet evolution – but one that stays. — VANESSA AGUE
PAL-079 Bill Orcutt LP
“How to Rescue Things”
Charlie Parker’s first album with a string section landed in 1950, ten years after his debut recordings. Although the overtly lush arrangements of Charlie Parker with Strings were Parker’s idea, the record must’ve been something of a relief to producer Norman Granz, especially when the sides went on to become Bird’s best- seller, by a long shot. The record (and its follow-up) sparked something of a jazz-strings virus, infecting Nina Simone, Paul Desmond, Clifford Brown, and (later) Miles and Trane. And while the latter entries in that list were clearly bending their arrangements into space-age forms (and the arrangers – Gil Evans, Eric Dolphy – were becoming much hipper), these ubiquitous strings albums established a jazz cliché of sorts. They were a shot for the charts at worst, an attempted reinvigoration of tired easy- listening ear candy at best.
How to Rescue Things, landing 15 years into Bill Orcutt’s “rediscovery” years, marks a somewhat tardy entry into the string- sweetening sweepstakes. In a post-chart, post-irony world, no one is going to mistake this as a bid for mainstream ears — nor are too many pop-gobblers going to paste this into their “Chillax” playlist. With loops of dulcet, birdsong choruses, syrupy strings, and plucked harps clipped from an RCA easy-listening disc, the zombie strings conjure not red leather couches, cotton slankets, and yuzu martinis, but rather a clockwork mortuary, an undead Who-ville and a cigarette butt drowned in bottom-shelf scotch. In contrast to Orcutt’s previous reanimation of yesterday’s hit parade,
How to Rescue Things instead takes as its foundation the oily underbelly of the American songbook, the relentless gears that churn melody into newly consumable and marketable forms — simultaneously ersatz, soothing, and funereal.
It’s easy to use saccharine, easy-listening settings to deconstruct the romanticism of the past. Yet How to Rescue Things is not an ironic record. True to its title, the transparently corny strings serve not as a meditation on cultural vacuity, but as an attempt to rehabilitate the clichés of the past, “rescuing” them as improvisational grist for new melodic content. They serve as a harmonic substrate for some of Orcutt’s most complex playing, and free him to explore the solo-as-such without the need to imply an underlying tune (unlike Orcutt’s previous acoustic explorations of nostalgic song).
Orcutt’s razor-sharp Fender slices through the satiny settings in angular and unexpected ways, particularly in the final tracks “Requiem in Dust” and “The Wild Psalms,” where his double picking swerves into almost Sharrock-ian territory. But ultimately, true to the Parker records that started this whole trope in the first place, Orcutt sticks to a complex yet tonal path throughout, imbuing tracks like “Not Reconciled” (with its crooned “Oh my god” and a cheeky “amen” tacked to the end) with wide-eyed romantic optimism that goes down strange in a deathbed ballad. But ultimately, it’s not strange at all. Rather, this palliative track celebrates a necessary, death-defying joy in the face of darkness — whether genuine or performative is unimportant. And what’s more genuinely American than whistling past the graveyard? Just ask Judy Garland. — TOM CARTER
Sanctuary 3:42
Not Reconciled 5:33
How to Rescue Things 4:56
Old Hamlet 3:24
Pylon Pylon! 3:21
Requiem in Dust 3:44
The Wild Psalms 5:15
PAL-087 Ava Mendoza LP/CD
“The Circular Train”
Ava Mendoza has never made an album quite as personal as her second solo full-length, The Circular Train. Through her decades of collaborations with Nels Cline, Carla Bozulich, William Parker, Fred Frith, Matana Roberts, and Mick Barr — plus years leading her power trio Unnatural Ways and playing in Bill Orcutt’s quartet — the guitarist’s name has become synonymous with virtuoso technique, raw passion, and visceral resonance, a player pushing the edges of the guitar’s possibilities. Along the way, from 2007 to 2023, Mendoza was writing these slow-burning, incandescent songs. The Circular Train is comprised solely of her single-tracked guitar playing and, on two songs, her corporeal singing. Her first solo LP of original material since relocating from California to New York City a decade ago, much of The Circular Train was honed amid pandemic years that clarified the virtues of slowing down.
This expressive avant-rock is a definitive introduction to one of the most uncompromising and inquisitive visions in creative music. Mendoza’s thrilling melange of free jazz, blues, noise, classical training, and blazing experimental rock’n’roll all coheres with ecstatic feedback, with picking and solos that crest with shimmer. Sometimes she sounds like a one-woman Sonic Youth with guttural and poised vocals that equally evoke Patti Smith and blues greats like Jessie Mae Hemphill. Conceptually, The Circular Train is presented as a psychogeographical train ride through certain of Mendoza’s musical homelands. The songs draw on ancestral and recent familial memories, notably of her parents’ roots in mining towns — in her father’s home country of Bolivia and mother’s hometown of Butte, Montana, each country with its own history of colonialism, racism, forced labor, the eradication of culture and the subsequent excavation of it.
These adventurous songs were composed in cars and planes, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, in Los Angeles and upstate New York — which is to say in motion. “Ride to Cerro Rico,” named for the mountain and silver mine at the center of Potosi, Bolivia, was inspired by Mendoza’s great grandmother’s life there in a Quechua mining family. “Dust From the Mines” drew from that history as well as Mendoza’s familial lineage of miners in Montana, building up to stunning swaths of shredded iridescence. “Pink River Dolphins” was inspired by a visit to the Amazon rainforest, swimming with dolphins alongside her father — the pink bufeos that inhabit both Bolivia and Columbia — and the song is dedicated to the memory of Mendoza’s late friend, the Colombian-American trumpeter jaimie branch. They shared a fascination with those intelligent and agile creatures who often communicate by echolocation. “Make a sound, it comes back around,” Mendoza sings, and later, “Echo, echo/The answer in a sound,” evoking what branch knew well: through music we navigate life.
The Circular Train contains one cover, “Irene, Goodnight,” composed by Gussie Lord Davis and popularized by Leadbelly; Mendoza has been performing it for over 20 years. Almost as deeply embedded in her repertoire is the penultimate track, “The Shadow Song.” “Treat your shadow kind and it might treat you good,” Mendoza sings on this song that she’s been reworking for over a decade, an emblem of devotion. “Treat your shadow kind and it might treat you right,” she repeats, becoming a blues mantra. What is a shadow self if not one’s secret world, which, once laid bare, awaits an echo, a return? — JENN PELLY
Bill Orcutt, Steve Shelley, Ethan Miller Trio
Kingston NY Tubby’s 11/19 Brooklyn Union Pool 11/20 Philadelphia Jerry’s on Front 11/21
The Consolation of Records: a new series on Palilalia starting with these five LPs. $10 each. Limited vinyl only. Bandcamp exclusive. No digital, no streaming, no repress.
PAL-082 Corsano/Orcutt “Live at Big Ears” PAL-083 Zoh Amba “Solo in Italy” PAL-084 Alan Licht & Bill Orcutt “At Land & Sea” PAL-085 Okkyung Lee & Bill Orcutt “Play Paris and Glasgow” PAL-086 Rivero/Heule/Orcutt “Soundtrack for New York Ghetto Fishmarket 1903”
PAL-081 Shane Parish LP
“Repertoire”
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
Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet Midwest Tour 2024
4/29 Philadelphia / Solar Myth
4/30 NYC / Le Poisson Rouge
5/1 Keene, NH / Nova Arts
5/3 Chicago / Two Shows (8:30 Sold Out / 10:30) Constellation
