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As Bill Orcutt's most mature and exhilarating LP to date, Music for Four Guitars was a slab of undeniable Apollonian beauty. It's approachability and obvious novelty landed it not only on the year- end lists of every key-pushing codger in the underground in 2022, but also on NPR in the form of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, an ensemble assembled to perform this music and featuring Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish in addition to Orcutt. But while their Tiny Desk Concert gave a whiff of the quartet's easy intimacy, the sterile confines of the virtual recital medium still left a puzzle unsolved how might these brutally mannered bricks of minimalist counterpoint sound on a stage in front of actual breathing bodies?InchThis was the question foremost in my mind when I first saw the quartet in San Francisco a few months before this double live LP was recorded. I was already familiar with the prowess of Eisenberg and Mendoza, two of the most technically intimidating shredders to blast out of the noise/improv underground, and knew Parish as the mastermind behind the epic translation of Orcutt's quartet recordings into a fully notated score. I was ready to be 'blown away'-and I most assuredly was. The quartet navigated Orcutt's jaggedly spiraling right angles into the shining core of the compositions with joyous ease, faithful to the originals in nearly every way (though their tempos were slightly ramped up, Blakey style, to communicate their breathless rush). The renditions were flawless, stellar and inspiring. I had expected nothing less.InchWhich leads us to this album, Four Guitars Live, recorded in November of 2023 at Le Guess Who? festival during the quartet's first European tour. The true essence of this set is not simply in it's faithfulness to the source compositions, but in the group's easy familiarity (no doubt the result of weeks on the road) and the
