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–To be released on cassette and digitally on April 29th, 2025. C60 – Tape packaging includes a 2-sided 5-panel J-Card with artwork by HausMo Max and concert photography by Ricardo E Adame. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.

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Hausu Mountain continues the HausLive series of live show recordings that capture some of the headiest moments in Chicago underground music. On HausLive 4, we rewind the clock approximately one year to May 3rd, 2024 at Constellation, where the all-star Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet (featuring Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish) made their barn-burning Chicago debut. The series channels the spirit of the informal bootlegging and tape trading of audience recordings as pioneered by the community surrounding the Grateful Dead, honing in on the raw live energy and in-the-moment emotions that can make any show stand out in the stream of time. Previous entries of the HausLive series have included audience recordings from Sunwatchers, Good Willsmith, and Moth Cock. Selected as part of the label’s ongoing collaboration with the prolific Chicago taper and HausMo mega-friend Joel Berk, HausLive 4 catches the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet in a sublime state of tour-hardened synergy with one another as they tear through the four-string guitar compositions that Orcutt wrote for his album Music for Four Guitars (Palilalia Records, 2022) with dialed-in fingers-on-fretboard precision, while also letting those songs evolve into flights of improvisation and extend into solo and duo passages led by each of the four guitarists. As Orcutt says on tape during one of the show’s interludes, “that record is thirty minutes; this show is an hour, so we’re improvising.” The resulting free-wheeling moments combine with the rigidity of Orcutt’s meticulous four-guitar compositions to form a program of music that draws power in equal measure from the forces of chance and discipline.

Bill Orcutt began his career in his hometown of Miami as the guitarist of the influential noise band Harry Pussy in the early 90s — a band whose vision of uncompromising DIY experimentation and brain-shattering performance art presented on their extensive US tours offered an early example for bands in the American underground noise circuit that many would come to follow. After disbanding Harry Pussy in 1997 and taking more than a decade off, Orcutt began a new phase of solo guitar performance with a series of LPs on the legendary Editions Mego label and on his own Palilalia Records. Performing on a guitar with four strings (leaving the lowest string and the three top strings), his output in this configuration careens between rushes of warp-speed atonal fretwork, accompanied by his wordless vocalizations, and damaged shards of blues, jazz, and selections from the Great American Songbook. Alongside his guitar-focused oeuvre, Orcutt created a digital audio software that he named Cracked, and has released numerous albums using it to disfigure and collide samples into unholy collages, which often center around individual looped and stacked voices that repeat ad nauseam. With Music for Four Guitars, Orcutt flipped the script to focus on intricate guitar arrangement and rhythmic precision, writing shorter pieces with four multi-tracked electric guitar voices that alternately lock together and diverge into bombastic leads with accompaniments. The elevator pitch for this album would go something like “Steve Reich minimalist pieces performed by four guitarists from Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band” or “Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra compressed into four voices.” Short rhythmic phrases loop and build upon each other to form complex mosaics, all presented with a skewed harmonic sensibility that slides from more legible melodies into abrasive atonality. 

Orcutt invited three guitarists, each with their own extensive pedigrees and multi-faceted careers, to realize Music for Four Guitars in a live setting: Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish. Hailing from Massachusetts and currently based in New York City, Wendy Eisenberg has experimented with spellbinding guitar-and-voice performance in the singer-songwriter vein, composed for large rock ensemble on their album Viewfinder (American Dreams Records, 2024), performed the guitar music of Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff, and improvised with numerous collaborators often within the scene orbiting John Zorn and his venue The Stone. They lead the post-punk / noise rock band Editrix, and recently started a duo called Whait with their partner Mari Maurice a.k.a. More Eaze. New York-based guitarist/composer Ava Mendoza’s bottomless catalog of music in small ensembles encompasses heavy rock, avant jazz, contemporary classical, blues, and virtually any style imaginable in which a guitar can be involved. She has worked with Negativland, Nels Cline, William Parker, Marc Ribot, and William Hooker, to name a few, and she released a transcendent solo album called The Circular Train on Orcutt’s Palilalia Records in 2024 that showcases her genre-colliding songwriting sensibilities and improvised impulses. Athens, GA-based guitarist/composer Shane Parish performs in the avant-rock trio Ahleuchatistas, who have released their unpredictable music on labels including Tzadik, Cuneiform, and International Anthem. His solo acoustic guitar practice, most recently featured on the album Repertoire (Palilalia Records, 2024), finds him interpreting “standards” from far-flung eras and styles of music, from Aphex Twin to Alice Coltrane — alongside a body of work of his own compositions in the experimental folk tradition. Parish teaches guitar professionally, and transcribed Orcutt’s Music for Four Guitars into a score that the band learned for their live performances.

Recorded at the midway point of their 2024 midwest tour, the sold-out first set of two shows on May 3 in Chicago at Constellation, HausLive 4 showcases the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet not only at the heights of their telepathic interplay and locked-in performance exactitude with their four-string guitars, but also riding a wave of wider public awareness beyond experimental underground music circles — having performed a year before at NPR’s offices for a taping of their popular Tiny Desk series. As the crowd’s first chance to see the Quartet before their eyes in Chicago, the energy in the room coursed with high electric excitement, as evidenced by the hooting and hollering in the moments between songs (of which perhaps the loudest exponent caught on tape was HausMo honcho Maxwell Allison). While the original Music for Four Guitars material conjured gravitas from the dry and brittle tones of Orcutt’s multi-tracked guitars, with just a little bit of amplifier fuzz coloring the edges of his spiraling phrases, the Quartet’s relatively louder and more distorted live performance draws power from four different players each with their own varied equipment and performance styles. 

In the passages of HausLive 4 that require the ensemble to meld into hive mind mode, Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet’s four-string guitars latch together into tight motifs with ostinato root notes ringing out on the lowest string and fleet-fingered phrases leaping from the upper strings. As they unwind into the segments of improvisation, playing longer solos or breaking off at times into duo configurations, the differences that characterize their own unique styles become apparent. Bill Orcutt’s tightly coiled solos flit between rushes of discordant animation and languid moments that evoke blues and jazz standards. The longest solo in the program here belongs to him, as he settles into a patient, even consonant idyll carried over sustained phrases and slowly unfurling arpeggios — evoking a session on the porch, with feet creaking against wood, as the sun rises through the trees on the horizon – before breaking the reverie with his signature flights of noise skronk. Wendy Eisenberg’s improvised playing speaks to their background in experimental jazz, as their fingers stretch far across the fretboard to form dense chord clusters and sophisticated phrasings that notably veer away from basement noise rock (although they’re just as comfortable in that idiom, to be sure). Their solos emphasize spidery runs full of rapid hammer-ons and refined chord progressions that call back to their solo practice in the singer-songwriter vein. Ava Mendoza, the Quartet’s resident shredder in this context, proves unafraid to get a little Eddie Van Halen with it, launching into distorted solos flecked with warp-speed tapping and chunky riffing. In other moments, she flexes her background in Downtown NYC improv scene with leads that pop with hard-picking, deep bends, and fractured blue notes, shifting the dial back towards atonality and abandon. When given the solo spotlight, Shane Parish breaks into the electric analogue of his traditional fingerpicked folk style, pouring long cascades of arpeggios out of the high strings and maintaining a steady bass foundation on the low string. Perhaps the most controlled force at play here, Parish still throws caution to the wind in aggressive passages that channel the prog bombast of his avant-rock background.

As these artists perform the Music for Four Guitars songbook on HausLive 4, we trace the balance and perhaps the contradiction that appears between Orcutt as composer and Orcutt as one voice among four idiosyncratic players. The moments when the Quartet locks into the tightly scripted pieces give the complexity and the beauty of Orcutt’s ideas room to shine in all their skewed grandeur, reminding us that these compositions, this “recital,” is the reason that these artists came together. At the same time, the band’s comfort in improvising with each other and opening the floor to solos and duos speaks to Orcutt’s trust in Eisenberg, Mendoza, and Parish as interpreters of his work outside of what’s written on the page. The music they offer us here, deeply saturated with individual personality and lived experience, comes to life in this vibrant incarnation because its performers have spent their lives not only honing their guitar skills (which, let’s be clear, are wild), but also honing their capacity to listen and respond to others, to embrace chance and uncertainty, and to meet their collaborators on shared ground. Being granted an hour of time to spend with the minds and the guitars of these four artists was a singular thrill in the room at Constellation. That energy flows through the audience recording captured on HausLive 4, in all its raucous intensity and generous communal spirit.

The Guitar Quartet, Live at Constellation, photo by Ricardo E Adame