Tone Glow 213: Bill Orcutt

The first in a series of five interviews with the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. Orcutt talks about running a movie theater, how he stumbles onto musical ideas, and 'Music in Continuous Motion' (2026)

All week, Tone Glow is hosting five different interviews in celebration of Bill Orcutt’s residency at Roulette and new album Music in Continuous Motion. The series will feature individual interviews with all four members of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet and conclude with a group interview. The other interviews can be found here: Shane Parish, Ava Mendoza, Wendy Eisenberg, and the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet.

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Bill Orcutt

Photo by Jim Hensley

Bill Orcutt (b. 1962) is a Miami-born, San Francisco-based guitarist and composer who has spent the past 40+ years playing music both solo and in various bands. Orcutt got his start in the Miami-based rock outfit Trash Monkeys before eventually forming the more raucous guitar-drum duo Watt with Tim Koffley. Later, he’d start the influential ’90s noise-rock and free-improv band Harry Pussy, featuring Adris Hoyos on drums. Orcutt has spent the past couple decades releasing a slew of solo albums—including A New Way to Pay Old Debts (2009), How the Thing Sings (2011), A History of Every One (2013), Bill Orcutt (2017), and Odds Against Tomorrow (2019)—as well as collaborative albums with Chris Corsano. More recently, Orcutt has released a self-titled album as Orcutt Shelley Miller (2025), and two guitar quartet albums, Music For Four Guitars (2022) and Music in Continuous Motion (2026). In May, Orcutt will release an album with Mabe Fratti titled Almost Waking (2026). Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Orcutt on February 16th, 2026 to discuss his first bands, his evolution as a guitarist, and the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. Also: Orcutt shares some of his favorite films.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: How’s your day going?

Bill Orcutt: I’ve been dealing with my anxiety around Roulette by trying to rehearse every morning. I got my rehearsal in today so I’m feeling good. Practicing is good because it makes all the abstract things you’re worried about real and concrete, and then they can go away.

Was it the same when you were in Harry Pussy?

I was just playing all the time so it wasn’t the same thing. There was no goal other than playing, and when we played live, we mostly played at [Miami venue] Churchill’s to nobody on Thursday nights. Frank [Falestra aka Rat Bastard] had an open mic thing, which nobody was invited to, so nobody was there—it was like two or three people performing to two or three people in the audience (laughter). When I first started playing again, I missed that. I don’t miss it anymore—I’m way too old to hang out at a bar—but I missed the idea of a place where you could just show up and play. I thought for a while I’d perform in some informal way like that, but I never got around to it.

Do you remember the first show you played?

I remember exactly where I was. When I was in college, I tried to form a band and was weirdly able to recruit two drummers but nobody else. I wasn’t able to corral them, though, or organize anything, so I wasn’t really in a band until I got out of college in ’84. I came back for grad school—I went to the University of Miami—and that’s around the same time I met these guys who did a performance art thing called Verbal Circus. It had words and saxophone and guitar and some kind of percussion. It wasn’t exactly music; it was like poetry, but not. Like, there were words that were artistic, but not in a bad way (laughter). I saw them at some event, and everyone was dreadful except for them. Luckily, my friend who brought me there knew them. It was meant to be.

I hung out a bit at their house and I was like, oh, these are the people in Miami I wanna be friends with. They needed a drummer so that’s what I became—I bought a drum set just so I could continue hanging out with them. We eventually formed a band called Trash Monkeys. For the first show, I remember counting off with the sticks and (laughs) nobody started—everyone in the audience laughed (laughter). That’s my first memory of performing.

What was the musical environment in Miami like?

I only knew my little corner of it. There were a lot of things happening that I wasn’t privy to, but in terms of rock music, it was a lot of cover bands or acts that were essentially cover bands—the songs they wrote sounded like covers even if they weren’t. I couldn’t find anything to get excited about until I saw Verbal Circus, and they were around the same age as me too. And even though I wasn’t playing my chosen instrument, it was nice to find people who had an aesthetic I could relate to and contribute to; it became a place to operate from. I needed to do something.

I played with them for three years. I had met this other guy, Tim [Koffley], and we started a guitar-drum duo [Watt] and played in that. It was a different kind of music, and it was instrumental. It was just two people, which was good. And that’s the band where I started playing the 4-string guitar. There was a lot of stuff to work on and I think it went well for about a year or two, then we started growing apart in terms of what we wanted to do.

I’m curious about Verbal Circus because you’ve mentioned your interest in Gertrude Stein in the past, and then you have those counting albums—Pure Genius (2020), A MECHANICAL JOEY (2021), The Anxiety of Symmetry (2023)—which could be understood as both plunderphonics and sound poetry exercises. Can you tell me about your interest in literature, poetry, and language and how you decided to make those albums?

It’s interesting you mention this because the Verbal Circus had a lot of repetition, a lot of repeated phrases and sounds, so it had a bit of sound poetry in there. Regarding those counting albums, I had previously made sound software projects that were influenced by Max and Pure Data. I spent a lot of time working on those, and by the time I finished, I was really sick of that visual programming interface and wanted to come up with a new API, a new way of structuring the sounds in code, and so it was more of a technical reason as to why I made the software [Cracked]. And when you’ve spent a year writing something, it’s like… well, I have to use it (laughter).

I started to make music and learned what I could do with that software, and at some point, I did something called New Words From The OED (2019). It used pronunciation examples from online and I incorporated those into a piece. I thought, oh, what else could I do with pronunciation examples? And that’s when I made Pure Genius (2020), where I used the number pronunciation guides. That led to thinking about counting, like… where else do people count? And that led to the Ramones. There’s a version of Pure Genius—I’m not sure if it’s the released one—where there’s more of a harmonic element to the counting, and that led to The Anxiety of Symmetry (2023). I went on Fiverr and hired a woman to sing the major scale with numbers and different note values—whole notes, half notes. All this evolved in a very step-like fashion; it wasn’t like I was interested in counting and went straight to it.

I know you were an English professor at some point.

Adjunct faculty. Initially, I had an assistantship when I was getting my MA at the University of Miami, and after I graduated I worked at different colleges in South Florida.

Were there specific things you sought to make sure your students understood? Was there a guiding philosophy to your teaching?

Not at all, really. I was a terrible teacher. Thank god this was before Rate My Professors because I would’ve gotten terrible reviews (laughter). This was something I just did to make money while doing a bunch of other things, so I wasn’t as devoted and attentive as I should’ve been. It got to a point where it was the beginning of a semester, I walked in, I looked at these people and I was like… haven’t I seen them before? They all looked the same. And I could tell what everyone’s grades would be before the first day of class was over, and that’s when I knew I needed to quit—if you’re having these thoughts, you’re really not where you need to be. And so I quit without a backup or anything. It had all run its course—there was nothing else for me to do there. As I get older and look at the jobs I’ve had, I always think I could do that so much better now. But at the time, you’re involved with other things and you’re behaving in a way where you’re cutting corners and just doing it for the money.

Why’d you choose to study English?

When I was in high school, I painted every day. I would come home from school and go into the garage and paint. What I really wanted to study was art, but I was the first one in my family to go to college and nobody was signing off on me studying that. I said, “Well, what if I study architecture?” I was enrolled in architecture and I discovered that it had nothing at all to do with art—it’s something completely different. So then the fallback from the fallback was English, and it was because I liked to read books. It seemed like the only acceptable thing.

Did you have the same mentality of, “oh it’s just a job,” when you eventually got into computer programming?

No, and that was interesting. I got my MA in English, I taught for a while, I dropped out of that, and I got interested in film and was making some myself. I got some grants and was living off of that, and I got involved with a group of people who had a not-for-profit called Alliance for Media Arts on Miami Beach. I ended up running that and became the Executive Director. I ran that for seven years.

They had started out doing screenings in bookstores, and Miami Beach at the time had a lot of real estate. It eventually became really expensive, but at the time they couldn’t find people to occupy the buildings, and these guys got a 10-year lease. There was a falling out, though, and people left—I was the only one who stayed. There were people moving into the area, and we changed up the programming to be a little more eclectic, and people came until the lease ran out. The lease was in the ’90s, so what was a 100-seat theater showing? It was South Beach, so we played a lot of New Queer Cinema—Todd Haynes and stuff like that. Anything that J. Hoberman liked, I was like, “Yeah, let’s play that.” (laughter).

Toward the end of that, the internet came. I still remember the first time I read a hyperlinked document in a browser. It was a drug—clicking links and jumping around. It was a whole thing. And this sounds silly for someone younger who grew up with it, but for someone like me who was in their 30s, it was insane. I had no interest in computers when it was just spreadsheets, but with browsers you had text and pictures and primitive animation and video and I just started playing around with it because I wanted to get involved. The gold rush started out here [San Francisco] during the dot-com boom, and so I left before the 10-year lease was up. I saw that the rents had gone up so high. Our building had been owned by a patron of the arts—Micky Wolfson—and he had to sell it, and our new landlord was not gonna cut us a deal. I knew that gig was gonna be up when the lease expired, so I left.

Do you remember the first websites you made?

Before I left Miami, I made a handful of websites. I know I made one for [filmmaker] Doris Wishman. Doris lived in Coconut Grove and she would come down because, in addition to the theater, we had a film co-op across the street and she taught a class there. She was working on her final feature, Dildo Heaven (2002), after hours and a guy there was cutting it for her. So I made her a website, and that was the most memorable one. I must’ve made one for the theater too, but I don’t remember doing it. When I moved out here, my first paid job was building something for Oddball Films. The guy who founded it has since passed, but he had a warehouse or loft in The Mission, and it was just stacked to the ceiling with educational films and other things. They had no web presence, so I built their first website.

You’re talking about Doris Wishman and New Queer Cinema, and I’m wondering how all of this exposure to indie and DIY films informed the way you thought about art. And maybe it wasn’t a direct influence, but I’m curious if there’s a connection given that a lot of this stuff was made with lower budgets.

It was just part of the mix of stuff that was inspiring to me. When we first opened the cinema, there were no movie seats per se—it was just plastic seats we got from Home Depot—and there was no projection booth either, it was a table at the back of the room. One of the first things we showed was Warhol’s early stuff. The MoMA had just made them available. That very minimal, structural work was the biggest film stuff I felt connection to—it was the outrageousness of it. But even the commercial stuff was all very inspiring. It was before you had this avalanche of everything getting reissued on DVD and being available on YouTube. It meant something. There’d be a print of Gun Crazy (1950) and you could watch it instead of some crappy VHS. It was exciting.

How did you manage to balance these different worlds of work and art? Or maybe you felt it was necessary for both of these things to exist.

There’s the time management aspect of it, and I don’t really know how I do what I do—I just do it. But then there’s this thing of worlds that don’t know anything about each other. I dealt with business people because I had this storefront on Miami Beach, but I was also playing in this band called Harry Pussy that’s getting mentioned in the local alternative weekly, and people knew me from that. How do you explain one world to the other? (laughter). I still don’t know how to do it, and you just have to put your head down and accept that not everyone’s gonna accept what you’re doing. You just have to do what you wanna do and ride the waves of miscomprehension (laughter).

Yeah, I understand that. It’ll happen often at work. Some of my coworkers know about the stuff I do outside of teaching, but others don’t. None of them have come to my film screenings, but I’ve had some students show up, which is exciting.

My kids are 20 and 22 right now, and it’s always more interesting to pick their brains. Like, how do they know all this stuff? Where is it coming from? They know so much about music and internet culture that it’d be a full-time job to even know half of what they do.

What have they shown you recently that you didn’t know? What stands out?

They’re both in college now, so my access to them is limited, but sometimes it’ll just be words and phrases that never clicked for me. It’ll turn out that a word has been around for 10 years and I never noticed it, and I’ll be like, ooooh (laughter). It’s interesting talking to them about music because they’re also really skilled at pandering to old people. On road trips they’ll DJ in the car, and they can put together some perfect “music for 60-year-olds” playlist and I’ll be like, “No, play what you’re into!” (laughter). It’s always more fun to let them drive the music conversation than for me to tell them about things that old people like. And the thing is, they’ll already know!

Is that how you approach collaboration then? Like, you’ll have the other person take the lead?

That’s a good question. I feel like it’s my idea to start with for sure, and then I’m trying to make it real. But on the other hand, you have to respond to other people. With the guitar quartet, I like the idea of taking these songs and turning them into something you can play in a room, but you have all this talent—this improvisatory talent—that they’re bringing and you have to create space for it to happen. If somebody’s better at something than I am, they’re absolutely gonna do it; it’s about making something together, so it doesn’t matter who does it.

Is this something you always knew how to do back in the day when performing in Harry Pussy or To Live and Shave in L.A.? Were there growing pains at all?

You know, I don’t think I ever played with To Live and Shave. Tom [Smith] did everything on his own. I mean, he played with Rat and later versions of the band had bandmates, but I think he just sampled me. For the longest time, I didn’t think he did, but when we were doing the box set, Rat sent me some photos and one was a wall of DATs, and one of them had my name on it. It was like, “Oh, he did have me!” Everything was so mashed together that nothing was identifiable.

Playing with Harry Pussy was a different thing. It was just really interesting in that Adris [Hoyos] hadn’t really played anything before, and it was a lot of figuring things out. It was like crossing a stream by leaping from rock to rock, like, “Okay, we’re here, now how do we get to the next one?” At some point we added a second guitarist, Mark Feehan, and that allowed us to try new things. And then Mark left and we had a new guitarist, Dan Hosker, who had a different skillset so we had to learn different things. In some ways, it involved a lot more inventing things from scratch. The guitar quartet is a lot more conventional in that it can be notated and taught to other people.

When Dan joined, I taught him a song, but it took a long time to convince him that he could learn it. We had to do some basic things so he could see that I was trustworthy. Like, this may sound like noise, but there’s a way to actually play it. I remember we spent seven hours learning 15 seconds of music (laughter). It sounds like an exaggeration, but we really started in the morning and worked until night. It was a whole process, you know? But then after he mastered the idiom, he could contribute to the creation of the music. We did one record together but nothing beyond that, so we didn’t get to build on it, but it was a really interesting experience and collaboration. Playing with Adris really just broke my brain open because I had to invent a new way to play in order to do something with her, so wherever I’m at now as a guitarist is filtered through playing with Adris.

Have you needed to invent a new way of playing the guitar with your solo records, or do you feel like you’re just refining things you already know?

A lot of times, one record will lead to another. The first solo electric record I made, which is the eponymous one (2017), has a song called “The World Without Me.” That’s something I stumbled onto when I recorded it, and that one track became the basis for the next record, Odds Against Tomorrow (2019). That whole album is nothing but attempts at capturing the magic that happened on the record prior. So a lot of the time you stumble onto one thing and it leads to another mutation, and so on. I hope that I’m learning and that my brain is still flexible to encounter new things, to incorporate them into what I do.

Do you think there’s a regional approach to how you approach music? Is there something distinctly Miami or San Francisco about your work?

I lived in Miami until I was 35. Though my kids were born in San Francisco, I feel like I’m forever stamped with Miami, and we go back there every year for Christmas. Miami at the time had a lot of extreme stuff, and Frank aka Rat had this studio that was by our house. I think I have come to accept that seeing Tom Smith work on his earliest records was influential. They were so wildly over-the-top and completely beyond what any sensible person in Miami was doing at the time. I probably would have denied it back then, but I do think living in Miami and getting to see that led to this feeling of, “What are you holding back? Just go for it.” And of course Rat was encouraging people. He had great taste in music, and he was always pushing people to do things that could get out into the world.

Talk to me about this new guitar quartet album, Music in Continuous Motion (2026), and what you did here that built on the previous one, Music For Four Guitars (2022).

I was really trying to avoid making another one because I didn’t know how the first one happened (laughter). I made it strictly because someone challenged me to do it, and it took seven years of occasionally fiddling with the idea to eventually stumble on how to do it. The challenge came from this guy I knew from Miami who moved to Columbus in the ’80s. We stayed in touch. At one point, he had a guitar quartet and he asked me to write something for it. I told him sure, but I couldn’t come up with anything, and it no longer became relevant because his guitar quartet broke up, but the idea stayed in my head. So for a long time, this idea stayed as a dream.

The guitar quartet music is so different from everything that’s come before—I thought nobody was gonna like it. I only made 300 copies of the first LP because I thought it was a throwaway thing, but then it became much more popular. And then it turned out you could make a whole band around it. The first album took a long time to make, and one of the first things I said to my booking agent was, “I don’t have to keep doing this, do I?” (laughter). She was like, “You can do whatever you want.” I have the Roulette thing coming up and it was like, am I gonna bring the quartet back together and play the same stuff? That sounds lame. In October or November, I finally came to the realization that I needed to do something new.

So yeah, I don’t know how I made the first album, and I don’t know how I made the second one. It has some wonderful moments, and Shane [Parish] has transcribed it all, and I’ve been learning and playing it every morning. There are some moments I love playing that feel really great—I’m having a good time. One of the things I said to Tom Carter when he was working on the one-sheet was, “I don’t understand how the same person, the same gear, the same procedure can produce different results, but it did.” (laughter). He’s a great writer. I’m surprised every publication isn’t hiring him to write for them. So few music writers have a thesis about something and then support it with a series of observations. It’s such an elemental thing, but it’s almost never done (laughter). I love Tom—great writer, great guitar player. Harry Pussy used to tour with Charalambides, so we’ve done van time together.

I love that the album was born out of a pressure to not be lame.

To not suck (laughter).

Is that something that happens often? Like, that’ll be a motivating factor for why you do things?

Sometimes an idea will burst into your brain and you’re done—it just lands fully-formed with a title and cover and it’s complete before you even play a note. Those records don’t need a lot of motivation. But then there are others where you’ve given yourself a task and you don’t know where it’s gonna lead and how it’ll happens. One of the first things I did when making the new album was go back and listen to all the discards from the first one—these were things that didn’t work that I threw out. I wanted to know what bad Bill Orcutt Guitar Quarter sounded like. It was terrible! It wasn’t holding together! A lot of the things I did on the new one, I tried to do on the first one—in terms of the sound and phrasing and techniques—but I knew what bad Bill Orcutt Guitar Quarter sounded like this time around. I needed to establish a baseline for what a failed version of this music sounded like, and when I was done with the second album, I liked it.

Was there ever a point in your life where you were playing guitar and it wasn’t fun? Maybe this was something technically complicated and it ended up being strenuous.

When I was working on A History of Every One (2013), the constructions were so thorough. I was taking every aspect of a song and crushing it, shredding it, and putting it through the Bill process. It required an intensity that I wonder if I possess anymore. My version of “Zip A Dee Doo Dah” was so difficult to play mentally, for example, and I had to get myself into that state to technically execute it. I don’t know if I would want to do that anymore because I… enjoy music (laughter). Music should be nice to play—children understand music! But that version of “Zip A Dee Doo Dah” is not music; it’s a very unnatural way for a human to move their body, it’s not good.

When you play guitar, do you make sure you feel comfortable, or are you still gonna contort your body and fingers in ways that are uncomfortable?

It’s definitely straining. And when I’m done at the end of the night, I need to come down a little. But it’s still music. By the time I got into A History of Every One, I was really pulling up everything by the roots. It was really hard and it was not healthy music to be playing—I was trying to do things that aren’t fun. I’ve moved into playing things that are, well, they’re not “normal,” but more understandable—they have rhythm and harmony.

I know with Harry Pussy that you had a rule that you’d never play any chords. And you also once said that at the core of your music, you’re ultimately trying to find your own way of playing the blues. Do you still set certain boundaries for yourself? Do you still feel like you’re trying to find a way to play the blues?

At this point, I have a pretty long tail. I have all this history of playing—decades now—and I don’t have to search to find who I am because it’s already there. As far as imposing rules, there’s a little bit of that, but it’s been fewer and fewer. There’s this tuning that we used in Watt that Tim came up with—it’s like standard tuning but you tune the low E up to a G. I use that all the time now, and it’s probably the most common tuning I use. But in Harry Pussy, I could never have used it because it’s too consonant—it’s impossible to get the kind of sound I wanted. We did have tunings there, but it was standard tuning with everything a half-step down, like Hendrix.

So yeah, one of the rules in Harry Pussy was that there were no chords—as in, sounding multiple notes simultaneously in an organized fashion. My computer music, by necessity, is rule-based because that’s all you’re doing: you’re creating rules. And playing with Steve Shelley and Ethan Miller… those guys are their own rules (laughter). We have no explicit rules there, but there are specific types of things they’ll play. I should say that none of this is dogmatic, but sometimes you need those rules. For example, Dan joined Harry Pussy and he came from a normal rock background. He wanted to contribute, but the things he was contributing were not appropriate, so there had to be rules.

I want to ask about How to Rescue Things (2024). With that album, you’re playing alongside this schmaltzy pop. How’d you approach that? And do you often think about your guitar playing and how it gets recontextualized in different contexts?

That started pretty early on, leading to A History of Every One and Twenty Five Songs (2013). At some point I had this way of playing, and you could call it a style—I’m not sure if that’s right—and I started to wonder what else I could do. I didn’t want to improvise over and over again; I wanted to find different settings where I could do this thing. So this all started over 10 years ago, and one of the ideas was Orcutt with Strings. I was familiar with Bird With Strings, and all the history of jazz records that used strings.

To me, the album was kind of an ironic thing, and it was another record where I thought nobody was gonna like it—it’s just way too goofy. Working on the project was really about finding the strings, finding what would work harmonically with me to play against, that would have the right tone. I hadn’t anticipated that people would react to it so emotionally. I thought it’d be like, “Orcutt with Strings, ha ha.” But people were like, “Orcutt with Strings… it’s beautiful!” (laughter). People also associate it with Christmas, and I’m like, “Christmas? I don’t wanna go to Christmas at your house if that’s what it sounds like.” (laughter). It took me a long time to find the strings because I was starting from blank, and then I realized that it had to be gospel strings, and then the second revelation was big band, old-time crooner-type strings. That was the search, and it led me to all the music I use on that.

I’m always looking at history, and I have a utilitarian mentality… what can I steal, what can I plunder, what isn’t locked down that I can cart away? (laughter). The people who buy my stuff are fairly knowledgeable, so if I make a reference, I assume that people are gonna get it. Like, what guitar players do I like? What have they done? And how can I adapt what they’ve done to what I’m doing? There are those Derek Bailey drum ‘n’ bass recordings, and it’s an unusual idea for a record to play along with other people’s recordings, and it struck me that I was doing something similar for How to Rescue Things. Though, that wasn’t the original thinking.

What’s it been like performing with the guitar quartet? What do you think you’ve been able to learn in this new context?

I like them all as people, so it’s fun to hang out with them. One of the interesting things about it is that I’m playing the same thing every night. When I’m playing solo, it’s not the same—it’s improvised. And even playing in Orcutt Shelley Miller, that’s different too. Even though half the guitar quartet set is improvised, it’s interesting to go to different cities and play the same things. I like to have a balance of stuff, and it’s interesting to hear them every night in a new room, to learn about the songs from playing them in front of different people.

What’s something you’ve learned from playing in front of different people?

One thing I’ve learned is that our songs are very short (laughter). When we play “A different view,” which is the first song on the first record, we play it and then we stop, and the audience is completely confused because we’ve only been playing for 90 seconds. They’re like… what? Listening back to live tapes, I’ve noticed that there’s always double the gap before they start applauding because they’re not really sure the song’s over.

Also, hearing the rhythms… one of the things is that we come from different worlds. Ava [Mendoza] in particular is very precise about everything. The way the sound tends to work out is that the band separates into the left half and right half. Sometimes, the two halves of the band aren’t always hearing each other as well as they could. I have come under some criticism for not being in time, and I had to explain to them that when John Lee Hooker played live with a pick-up band, he’d turn the beat around, he’d do things that an idiosyncratic folk musician that is used to performing alone would do, and the band would have to adapt to whatever he was doing. And in this metaphor, I am John Lee Hooker (laughter). Just adapt to what I’m doing!

Do you four sit in the same order every time?

Yes, we do.

I also appreciate that with this Roulette residency, you have other musicians playing, including those whose work you’ve championed. You have Chuck Roth on the bill, for example. watergh0st songs (2025) was one of my favorite albums last year. Are you constantly keeping up with new music, are people showing you these acts, are you seeing these artists live—what’s the situation there?

I’m paying attention to whatever is out there that I stumble upon. Those DMG [Downtown Music Gallery] videos are very useful to me and I’m always looking at those. If anybody is holding a guitar, I’m definitely turning on the volume and Googling their name. I’m interested in people who are underappreciated, unknown, or just starting out, and solo guitar is the focus of what I release. I’m rarely finding but always looking.

I like that your new album’s cover art references Leonard Cohen. Are you a big fan?

I like him, though my main reference point is McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). I mean, I paid for that font, dammit, so I’m gonna get my money’s worth (laughter). But at this point I think I’m sick of it.

Are you often thinking about films and the feelings they provide as a way to approach your own music?

It’s not a film, but at the San Francisco MoMA, they have a room devoted to the paintings of Agnes Martin. It’s a beautifully designed room with central seating so you can look at these hallucinogenic paintings. I always come out of that room thinking, that’s music—there’s music there. And I always try to come up with something but it never works (laughter). It’s like the quartet—I spent seven years trying to write something and I couldn’t, and then I eventually did. So one day, I hope to figure out music that sounds like Agnes Martin. I know that John Zorn has Agnes Martin pieces, but some day I hope to figure it out.

Earlier you were talking about things being musical or not. Is it important that your songs are beautiful and accessible?

Lately, I’ve been feeling that I need to make something unlistenable (laughter). Like, I need to do something unpleasant—I’m selling out making this pretty, toe-tapping music! (laughter). I say this, but I have a record that is on the verge of coming out, and it’s another computer music record. Maybe that’ll fulfill that mission. So, I’m at a crossroads at the moment. The second guitar quartet album is not new ground. Even though it’s different, I’m not doing something from scratch. I have ideas, but the thing is you never know what’s going to work and what’s not. I have a list of ideas on my phone, and it’s nice to just take it out, look at them, see what I was thinking about, and see if I have any new thoughts. I’m really busy right now but I have some time blocked off in the summer. I’ll see what happens.

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?

You know where I’m going after this interview is over? My wife and I are gonna go see a movie—Wuthering Heights (2026). I haven’t seen Saltburn (2023) either, but I got pissed off because everybody was like, “Bill, you’re not gonna like Saltburn, that’s not your type of movie.” I got so annoyed at people telling me what my type of movie is that I was like, “I’m gonna see Wuthering Heights!” My wife was like, “You’re gonna walk out.” But I won’t! I won’t walk out! (laughter). We’re gonna go see it at the mall here.

Is that something you feel is also true about your career? You don’t like being pigeonholed?

I like to upset the applecart. I like to challenge myself with things that are outside of my zone. When they first announced that movie I was like, along with multiple people, this is ridiculous. So I’m excited to see it since I’ve decided I must see it—it’s a challenge.

Do any albums come to mind where you felt you were really going out of your comfort zone and it maybe sucked?

I did some poetry. I did one for Chocolate Monk [Daddy’s Got a Spice Rack (2014)] and one for another label. It was similar to what I was saying before, where I just stumbled upon these ideas. When I was working on A New Way to Pay Old Debts (2009), I had this verbal tic that popped up, and I was repeating this phrase, and I couldn’t get through the phrase. I thought there was something there that felt deep, and that turned into a couple of records. Nobody wants to hear me doing poetry (laughter), so those are things that are rarely discussed, with good reason (laughter).

With good reason?

Well, you asked about records that were beyond the pale (laughter).

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I feel like, for better or worse, I am a continuation of my father and grandfather. I look at their lives and see ways in which my life is an extension—and is somehow derived—from their own. I don’t know why I love that or if I love it, but it’s the first thing that popped into my head. They had their own way of thinking about things, my grandfather especially.

Bill Orcutt’s Music in Continuous Motion is out now. Bill Orcutt’s residency at Roulette happens this weekend. More info can be found here.

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Bill’s Picks

I asked Bill Orcutt to send a list of films that were important to him. The following is what he sent, reproduced here in the same exact order.

Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991)

• The Incredible Mr. Limpet (Arthur Lubin, 1964)

  • Saw this as a kid, stars Don Knotts as a near-sighted loner who turns into a talking fish. I’m super near-sighted and immediately related. I later had a similar reaction to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce, 1916)—one of the great works about myopia.

• Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “Royal Episode Thirteen” (1970)

  • Saw this—specifically the cannibalism sketch—as a tween completely unprepared in a motel room in Lake Placid, Florida. Life-altering.

• Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1970)

  • Took a seminar with Alain Robbe-Grillet when he came to Gainesville for a semester. We saw a bunch of his movies, Buñuel, and other classics, but this one, projected in 16mm on a classroom wall, blew my head off.

• Bad Girls Go to Hell (Doris Wishman, 1965)

  • I met Doris Wishman after inviting her to a screening at the Alliance. She stood me up at the last minute, but we became friends and she worked on her last film “Dildo Heaven” at the Alliance Co-op and taught a filmmaking class there. Impossible to pick one, but this is my favorite title.

• Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991)

  • The Alliance showed this first run when it came out. Inspiring in every way.

• Hippy Porn (Jon Moritsugu & Jacques Boyreau, 1991)

  • Called the director Jon Moritsugu at home without warning and booked this. Good phone call, think we were both stoned.

• I Shot Andy Warhol (Mary Harron, 1996)

  • Iggy Pop came to a screening at the Alliance while I was there and I hijacked the end credits, inserting The Stooges’ “1969” over the Yo La Tengo track that was on the soundtrack.

• Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950)

  • I read J. Hoberman and tried to book anything that got a good review. This rerelease was one of them. Great movie!

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Thank you for reading the 213th issue of Tone Glow. “It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.”

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