Bill Orcutt’s always going to be associated with most noisome aspects of music. His discography isn’t the deepest thing in the world, and mostly centers around his time as guitarist in Harry Pussy, a Florida based noise/rock duo (sometimes trio) specializing in unhinged explorations of what a basic band can do. It’s during the nineties’ and Orcutt’s time with Harry Pussy that he developed and refined (?) an approach to guitar not requiring the normal six strings. He uses four.

Even with that restriction placed on his playing – it might actually open up the instrument’s possibilities, depending on who you’re talking to – Orcutt was able to forge a language detached from traditional tones and even rock music while remaining tied to music’s past by dint of Harry Pussy’s set up.

Having gone silent subsequent to his group’s split in the late nineties, Orcutt returned to his oeuvre in 2008 as he was assembling a compilation for Load Records. It’s out of this re-examination that the guitarist decided to record and issue the (kinda) new A New Way To Pay Old Debts for Palilalia.

As Harry Pussy fans might guess, there’s at least a passing similarity between work Orcutt recorded during the nineties and these new songs. Of course, here the guitarist plays an acoustic instrument and isn’t accompanied by a drummer. Somehow, though, he’s still able to wrench free some terrific noise even as a good portion of it comes off as more musically inclined than Orcutt’s earlier works.

Instead of taking a track by track approach to distilling A New Way To Pay Old Debts, the atmosphere of the disc, itself, should suffice. Recorded in his apartment, Orcutt took the time to rig a set up to enable his playing to reverberate off the high ceilings, bounce around between the actual guitar and the source of its electric voice before being captured on the microphone placed between the guitarist and his amp.

Orcutt’s referenced recordings of old blues players as to why he desired such a relaxed setting. And it works. “Street Preachers,” aptly counts a bit of street noise – there’s a siren and some other indistinguishable sounds. A few tracks on, Orcutt even hums a snatch of melody before diving into the next selection.

Most likely, these dissonant recordings aren’t gonna please most acoustic guitar folks. But if listeners have a taste for the extreme, this is a pretty good place to start.