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Chris Corsano

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Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt, “Play at Duke” (Palilalia, 2023)

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These two singular artists have been fitfully playing together for roughly a decade now and they have released a number of albums documenting their incredible duo performances. Notably, their most recent union was for 2021’s absolutely killer Made Out of Sound album, but that one was a bit of an aberration for the duo, as it was a studio creation crafted remotely. Happily, Play at Duke captures the pair back together on stage where they belong. The stage in question was unsurprisingly at Duke University, but the album’s prosaic title omits a rather significant detail: the performance in question closed out Three Lobed Recording’s 21st anniversary festival in appropriately riveting fashion. While both artists rank among my favorite musicians and have truly incredible chemistry as an improv unit, some performances are undeniably better than others and Play at Duke feels like an especially inspired night to me. Moreover, Orcutt and Corsano make a virtue of brevity as well, as there is not a single wasted note or even a hint of a lull in this 25-minute tour de force.

The performance feels like an unusually joyous one right from its first rolling toms and major chords, which makes sense given that the performance was the culmination of a three-day festival in which Orcutt and Corsano were surrounded by great music, a host of their peers, and a sizable audience of receptive fans waiting to be properly blown away. It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment in which I was blown away myself upon hearing the album, but I am confident that it occurred some time during first of the performance’s three sections, as the duo quickly strain toward the transcendent and ecstatic (Orcutt’s wordless vocal howls tend to be a fairly reliable indicator that a particularly incendiary performance is underway). Naturally, there are plenty of killer licks and technically dazzling drum fills throughout the album, but the true beauty lies less in what Corsano and Orcutt play than it does in how they play it, how they interact with each other, and how they feed off the volatile spontaneity of live improvisation.

Stylistically, the terrain on Plays at Duke will be quite familiar to Bill Orcutt fans: a freewheeling blend best described as sort of virtuosic No Wave blues, though there are occasionally some Hendrix-y touches that feel like a fresh development. I was far more struck by the sheer visceral ferocity of Orcutt’s playing, however, as he frequently unleashes fiery frenzies of wild bends, violent twangs, snapping open strings, convulsive riff deconstructions, and rapidly scrabbling fretboard runs. Notably, however, those expected firestorms are beautifully (and seamlessly) balanced with more tender and melodic passages where Orcutt will linger on a single note or chord. While I tend to prefer the more intense passages as a whole, those more feral passages are able to make a deep impact over and over again primarily because Orcutt and Corsano share a virtuosic intuition for effectively manipulating dynamics: intensity waxes and wanes, attacks and decays vary, and a soulful array of other moods are touched upon far beyond “ecstatic volcano.” Both Orcutt and Corsano are in peak form on Play at Duke, as it feels like I am hearing two incredible solos at once that are organically intertwined, thrillingly spontaneous, and much, much more than the sum of their parts.

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Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt, “Made Out of Sound” (Palilalia, 2021)

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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‚Äôs 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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“Dead C vs. Rangda” (Ba Da Bing, 2013)

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This unusual split is basically just an excuse to release a handful of lost songs from around the time of Dead C’s Eusa Kills album (1989), but that is just fine by me (particularly since I like Rangda too). It is an inspired pairing for a number of reasons, but the primary one is that the two bands could not possibly sound more wildly different: the Rangda half sounds like a trio of skilled musicians intuitively improvising together, while the Dead C half is an endearingly shambling mess. Despite that yawning stylistic chasm (and a two decade span between the sessions), both bands offer at least one song that beautifully highlights what they do best.

The whole idea of “lost” Dead C songs is very amusing to me, as this split makes it very clear that the line between an actual Dead C song and a recording of them aimlessly messing around in rehearsal is probably a very blurry one indeed. That is not to say that these four songs are not likable, but things like hooks, structure, melody, fidelity, and tightness have never been the trio’s greatest talents. Rather, they seem to have been put on earth solely to sound gloriously wrong at all times and to seem extremely cool while doing it. 

Both “Eusa Kills” and “Tomorrow” are ideal testaments to that unique brand of genius, as the former is basically an avalanche of over-the-top distortion and half-mumbled vocals propelled by a skeletal drum machine beat, while the latter unleashed some impressively ugly and anti-virtuosic guitar squall over a jazzy shuffle. The remaining two pieces, however, fall a bit short, amounting to little more than prickly lo-fi ambiance and something that sounds like a decontextualized live guitar solo shorn of the surrounding song.

For their side, Rangda offer up just two pieces: the lengthy “Gracilaria” and the shorter “Sancticallist,” one of which highlights everything wrong with the trio and one which highlights everything right. Sadly, the longer one is the misfire, as Sir Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny do a whole lot of sleepy noodling before eventually erupting into a woefully unearned crescendo. Chris Corsano gamely tries to inject some excitement into the proceedings by bringing his usual intensity, but he has virtually nothing to work with—it just sounds like two boring guitar solos over the top of a good drum solo rather than anything coherent.

Curiously, “Sancticallist” is not overtly all that different, but everything somehow locks together beautifully into a condensed, simmering, and oft-explosive whole. It is remarkable just how dramatic the difference between improvisations can be with no clear reason, as the magic is either there or it is not, regardless of the strength of the underlying motifs: “Sancticallist” is simply great, while “Gracilaria” is clearly not.

Naturally, there is no getting around the fact that this is a very minor release within both bands’ discographies, but that does not diminish it at all, as it does not pretend to be anything more. Essentially, Ba Da Bing located a handful of Dead C songs that no one has heard, then decided to make them available in a stylish and inspired way (a limited vinyl-only release with striking cover art and a similarly cool band on the flipside). As such, this is kind of a perfect release: casual fans can safely pass it by knowing that there is nothing truly essential or revelatory to be found, while more devout fans will undoubtedly be very pleased with both the music and the physical object.