In theory, any album recorded by the duo of Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt should be an instant Album of the Year candidate for me, as the pair are easily among my favorite musicians on the planet. However, 2018’s explosive Brace Up! was not quite my thing, calling to mind Orcutt's earlier and viscerally cacophonous Harry Pussy days. I have no doubt that seeing the duo live during that period would have either torn off my head or melted my face, but that album is not the one I reach for when I have an Orcutt craving. Happily, the opposite is true of this latest convergence of the two fiery improv iconoclasts, as Made Out of Sound resembles one of Orcutt's more recent solo albums organically intertwined with some oft-incendiary free drumming. Despite being generally more melodic and less feral than its predecessor, however, the more nuanced Made Out of Sound is nevertheless a radical and intense recording in its own right. It is truly rare to encounter such seemingly effortless and fluid chemistry between two artists with such instantly recognizable and attention-grabbing aesthetics.
In wrestling with how to best describe Orcutt's playing on this album, my mind predictably kept returning to the phrase Ira Gitler once famously used to describe John Coltrane's aesthetic: "sheets of sound." In Orcutt's case, however, most of Made Out of Sound feels more like sheets of rain falling on a pond: individual drops constantly and rapidly changing the rippling patterns with each small splash. There is also the potential to be startled by a surprise duck. Translating that into more musical terms, the drops are the ringing open strings, the rippling pond is a mass of constantly evolving harmonies and dynamics, and the surprise duck is the snarling, snapping, and scrabbling flurries of notes that Orcutt sometimes unleashes. Notably, that metaphorical pond scene also includes a dangerously intense wave machine in the form of Corsano's whirlwind free-form drumming.
Given their collaborative history, it is hardly surprising that the duo's interplay feels so natural at this stage, yet the best moments of the album feel so uncannily instinctive and spontaneous that the wash of sound almost seems like a churning, heaving living organism. Remarkably, the duo recorded their parts separately from different coasts, which makes the “live” intensity and fluid interplay feel almost miraculous, but also allowed Orcutt more space for nuance than usual (as well as the ability to overdub a second guitar track). If I was forced to choose a favorite piece, I would probably pick one of the more melodic ones like the wistful "Some Tennessee Jar" or clattering, tumbling pathos of "Man Carrying Thing," but the whole damn album feels akin to witnessing a pair of magicians flawlessly perform one dazzling trick after another (the trick in each case being "distilling primal/art-damaged blues into a pure, expressionist catharsis that transcends conventional scales, chords, melodies, rhythms, and genre tropes"). Every single one of these pieces feels like a vivid eruption of pure, direct emotion that leaves compelling music in its wake. This is a canonical Bill Orcutt album.
Samples can be found here.
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