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.”

The Anxiety of Symmetry might then be comparable to artist Hanne Darboven’s quasi-Minimal compositions and their basis in odd mathematical calculations derived from the calendar, in taking its cue from an extra-musical process. The two pieces’ polyphony is not far off from Orcutt’s recent Music for Four Guitars, but also marks Anxiety as a departure from both Pure Genius and A Mechanical Joey. The latter bypassed melody and harmony altogether; its relentless, phantasmagorical looping and subdivisions of Joey Ramone’s trademark onstage count-offs could be seen as a wry comment on the repetitions within repetitions of rock songs and their ongoing performances, or simply the monomania of years of touring for months on end. Pure Genius presented a male and female voice stolidly reciting the numbers that correspond to the notes of a scale that are simultaneously generated with sine tones (i.e., when a voice says “one,” the first note of a scale is heard at the same time); Anxiety collapses Pure Genius’ juxtaposition of pitch and counting by having the numbers sung. Stripped down yet excessive (in the tradition of his other works with Cracked), Anxiety seems less like its predecessors’ deconstructions than a new kind of subversive easy listening. — Alan Licht