Harry Pussy - One Plus One Review

During their brief, mid-1990s career, Miami noise killers Harry Pussy played most often as a trio, with five musicians involved at various points. But their core was always the founding duo of guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer/singer Adris Hoyos. The former's unmistakable car-crash sound and the latter's primal beats and soul-stiffening screams defined the group's destructive aesthetic, leading Douglas Wolk to brand them "just about the most abrasive band America has ever seen."

Though they earned that superlative, it's slightly misleading. Because while Harry Pussy could over-stuff speakers with bracing din, they also injected space and structure into their racket. At times they sounded more like a punk-damaged free jazz group than an abstract noise machine. That's especially true of early duo recordings by Orcutt and Hoyos, where the pair's intuitive interplay is clearest. When Orcutt pinches out piercing notes and Hoyos responds with snare slaps that propel him into clanging chords, the result is more conversation than confrontation.

Orcutt used only duo material to create One Plus One, combing through over 10 hours of Walkman-recorded sessions. Along the way he grabbed some pieces that had already appeared without titles on early 7"s, but he edited them anew and gave them all names. That may seem purposefully confusing, but Orcutt's intent was actually genuine. He approached One Plus One as a new release rather than a reissue, selecting the best, most complementary material regardless of whether it had been heard before.

It was a wise choice, because One Plus One is better-paced and more coherent than anything released while Harry Pussy were still together. It still has tons of clamor and dissonance, and even the most welcoming songs challenge ears. But the album flows with a distinct internal logic, as Orcutt and Hoyos revisit sounds, work out ideas, and explore what happens when they use the same moves in different contexts. So when Orcutt repeats a vibrating riff in "Forming", it resembles a fractured Link Wray outtake; when he stretches a similar chord into a stoned drag during "On the Couch", it evokes the Dead C applying their patented lurch to "Forming"....full text In spite of their short life on the musical stage, Miami-based band Harry Pussy was really influential and left their mark on the noise scene through an aesthatics which was totally irriverent not only to the so-called bourgeios respectability and the vapidity of pop culture, but also to the musical structures of punk song itself: most of their tracks were untitled and sometimes they got fun with other aspects of typical musical publishing "receptacles" such as they did by "Please, Don't Come Back From The Moon / Nazi USA", issued by Blackjack Records in 1994, where they splitted tracks into two halves, a half a side, instead of putting a single track on each side, while their style was focused on headlong dashes over furious, violent and explicit songs and even the interaction between the band and the audience reflected their eruptive elan, mainly propelled by shrill high notes and fast drumming by Adris Hoyos and guitar rapes by Bill Orcutt. The reissue of their "posthumous" and very rare release "Let's Build A Pussy" seems to be related to the retrospective issue of "One Plus One", a double LP issued by Orcutt's label Palilalaia including the 'Vigilance' cassette, the Planet & 2nd Esync singles. When it was released, most of reviewers tended to interpret this release based on the yell by Adris (it "clearly" appears for 2-3 seconds in the first track), which had been computer-processed, thinned and stretched out by Bill over four 15-minutes lasting tracks, which are not so different from audio tracks for those funny toys known as brain machines as the sensation of "giddiness" for your ears is going to be similar to the one you could experience after a "program" on those toys or software wehich works in a similar way like i-Doser, as a certificate of death, but I think that Harry Pussy's last act could have not only a funereal worthiness. The hint at feminine shape in the title could be linked to the association between the curvy feminine body and the sweet undulations of the sonic waves built by Orcutt, but I'd say another possible key for the interpretation of "Lets Build A Pussy" where the initial scream which seems to say "dance" or "death" preceding this mindblowing bunch of frequencies, could be related to the foreseeable direction of musical research (it was issued in 1998), seemingly close to the research of cognitive science, focused on the representation and the induction of artifical emotional states throughout sonic stimulations, the real artistic crime after previous acts of patronage and submission where music gets immolated to the needs of a demanding mass or alternatively of a meekness-demanding elite...full text The three new compositions that make up Exotic Exit were developed between 2010-2012 in both live performance and home studio settings. Mundane field recordings taken in Austin, TX and NYC are laced with viola, violin, cello, dulcetina and glockenspiel to create densely structured sound beds that smudge the line between Ferrari-esque audio travelogs and the hallucinatory sound processing of prime Asmus Tietchens. "Exotic Exit is a summary of my daily life and the environments that i passed through; traveling and remaining at home, walking, working, eating, talking and listening to music behind closed doors." (Vanessa Rossetto). Exotic Exit arrives in a full color high gloss sleeve with design/layout by Matthew Revert, in an edition of 400 copies. Kye....full text