ORCUTT, BILL - THE ANXIETY OF SYMMETRY (LP)

Bill Orcutt's latest "counting" album, The Anxiety of Symmetry, completes a trilogy on his Fake Estates label that started with Pure Genius (2020) and A Mechanical Joey (2021), all realized with his own Cracked computer music software. Comprising two 15-minute-long improvisations, the album's terrain is limited to six samples of female voices singing the number of the corresponding note value in the first six pitches of a major scale. These are fashioned into compact phrases (1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, etc.) that are looped and layered. As the loops combine in multiple permutations and cycles, their uneven lengths create polyrhythms and syncopations as well as harmonies. On the surface, Anxiety is unusually placid for Orcutt, reminiscent of Minimal classics like the "Knee Plays" of Phillip Glass' Einstein on the Beach (which also features sung numbers, although without the one-to-one relationship between pitch and interval number) and the breathy soprano voice loops in "2/1" from Brian Eno's Music for Airports. However, the album's title is adapted from Orcutt's essay of the same name in the Spectres III anthology about a compulsive behavioral condition known as "Just Right" and its parallels and possible applications to music, which suggests that this titular music's inspiration is not trance- inducement, but rather a kind of mental obsession with ordering and re-ordering. In the essay, Orcutt posits that "for the 'Just Right' subject composing or performing with the computer, the fixation with repetition, symmetry and arrangement in sound can be mediated with software, creating new prospects for both therapeutic engagement with their compulsions and the creation of music with a length, density and scale not possible without machines...Offloading one's "Just Right" auditory compulsions onto the computer fulfills the promise of automatic art, allowing the full expression of the subconscious by removing the need to focus on anything but the arrangement and rearrangement of elements, and the sounds themselves become merely a byproduct of the process of satisfying these feelings."