Screaming For No Reason

September 26, 2017 4:55 PM

Surround magazine takes a longform look at the music of improv rockers Bill Orcutt and Adris Hoyos, founders of the 1990s free rock/improvised hardcore band Harry Pussy.

Bill Orcutt
• The World Without Me
• A New Way to Pay Old Debts LP (2009)

Harry Pussy
• self-titled Siltbreeze 12" (1994)

posted by porn in the woods (5 comments total)

Eponysterical in a very '70s sort of way...
posted by queensissy at 5:25 PM on September 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

There's a lot of acts that got called "energy music", but Harry Pussy lived up to it without reservation, they were amazing live.
posted by idiopath at 5:54 PM on September 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Also, making music that can get stuck in my head with that much whammy bar is clear evidence of diabolical intervention.
posted by idiopath at 6:11 PM on September 26, 2017

Huh, I have totally missed them, & this is probably right in my wheelhouse.
posted by Devils Rancher at 8:18 PM on September 26, 2017

“The velocity with which Harry Pussy announced themselves on their debut self-titled LP may have led to a whole bunch of clubs closing their doors to them, or at least vowing never to have them back, but it also facilitated their induction into a bunch of seemingly disparate genres. They were a noise band, right? A hardcore band. A punk group. A free jazz duo. As with any encounter with a singularity, matter is crushed to infinite density and the pull of gravity is infinitely strong, which is another way of saying that the first Harry Pussy album was a black hole that devoured genre and that flattened any attempt to classify it. Drummer and vocalist Adris Hoyos was the engine of the group, the presence on the edge of the event horizon, with a style that collapsed in on itself again and again and that made for some of the most formally inventive structural imperatives ever detonated in the heart of a power duo. Listen to “1986”. It sounds like it is being played backwards in real time. Comparisons to drummers like Sunny Murray were helpful, in terms of establishing some kind of stable co-ordinates with which to make sense of Hoyos’s involution of time and the role of the drummer, but ultimately functioned as a dead end. Likewise the idea that Harry Pussy were a noise group. Okay, so it was the best we had at the time but a term like noise would seem to suggest that Harry Pussy were working outside of the vectors of what music would allow, outside of the strictures of song and if a band were ever strict—tight, even—then it was Harry Pussy, whose live shows—listen to them—saw them recreate the ‘studio’ recordings down to the last snapped string. “Alright, let’s play a song,” guitarist Bill Orcutt says at one point, as if to remind us. Orcutt rejects the concept of extended technique when applied to what he did in Harry Pussy but the point is that they played at such a heightened speed-of-thought climactic future-primitive peak that they outstripped technique so completely that people thought they couldn’t actually play at all and so dubbed them a ‘noise’ band. And if that doesn’t make the form extended it at least makes it circular. And what a sound; has the electric guitar ever sounded better? Those amazingexplosive sections on “Fuckology”; high tension blues, barbed wire sonorities, tactile, taut, everything metal and punk and noise seemed to hint at the first time you ever heard about it. I still wish “Fuckology” didn’t fade out but Harry Pussy’s music is truncated in time while extensive in density, in its ability to turn itself inside out, in a second, forever. The tonal centre is a black hole and the whole of the second side plays out exactly like that, like an extended singularity, and it is one of the most perfect sides of vinyl ever rendered. “Dream Diver” is Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” played as desperate man blues in its hysterical emotional flatlining, in its desolation, “I Don’t Care About Sleep Anymore” is a masterpiece; elegiac, staggering, genuinely beautiful, with Orcutt just weeping and bleeding all over the track. The duo’s inspired electro-convulsive take on Kraftwerk’s “Showroom Dummies” is the greatest cover version this side of Hüsker Dü’s evisceration and implied extension of The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”. Maybe The Magic Band came close, at points, to this kind of, well, magic, but for Harry Pussy the Trout Mask House was on the road, every night a trial by fire, a live action formulation of the new music. The bathetic nature of some of the between song dialogue works to assure us that this music was created in real time, by actual humans, with their bare hands. Listened to now I hear a weird pianistic aspect to Orcutt’s playing, an echo of Glenn Gould that he would go on to more fully explore via the obsessive tics of his solo music; you can hear it in the tightly held clusters, the bass insistent while the other hand elegises, inverting the piano so the right hand holds it down while the left hand flips. This is the piano as tempered drums via the guitar as suspended steel tempered by electricity. Sure, I’ve dubbed them a hardcore band in my time, a noise group, a punk jazz outfit, but none of them ever fit. Truly, Harry Pussy were a black fucking hole. So set it spinning.“

- David Keenan
posted by porn in the woods at 1:31 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]