oRSo is Phil Spirito (tenor guitars, banjos, vocals and lyrics) Gillian Lisee (keyboards, guitars, banjo and vocals) Ben Massarella (drums, percussion) with Brian Deck (electronics, remixing, drums, percussion, guitars) Tim Rutili (guitars, piano and vocals) Duke Lee (duketronics) Julie Liu (viola) Kelly McCracken (cello) Some of these musicians have played in rex, red red meat, loftus, califone, and HIM.
The pit band of the circus circuit has re-emerged. Having mastered the underbelly of carney rock on their self-titled debut, oRSo advances through added layers of melody and harmony creating a record of unexpected depth and beauty.
Phil Spirito tells tales of horse racing, low level mobsters, lady pyromaniacs, bull riding truck drivers and tiny ghost horses. Banjo, oil can, pianos and tenor guitars merge with electronic trickery to bring about this beautiful collection of vocal and instrumental yarns.
Long Time By takes a giant step forward in oRSo`s evolution from worldly bum to tender-hearted hustler.

Orso is a US-based band formed in 1996 and led by Phil Spirito and featuring Brian Deck of Red Red Meat and Ben Massarella of Califone. The musical style is self-described as "orchestrated folk weirdness"; their songs, which feature prominent banjo parts, also feature experimental sounds such as those made by typewriters and toilets. The band releases on Perishable Records.

Orso Changes Its Tune
Nov 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Rick Weldon
The ambient hillbilly twang of Chicago's Orso first emerged from the musical backwoods in 1999, when multi-instrumentalist Phil Spirito, a former member of the indie group Rex, emigrated from New York at the behest of friends in the Midwest. Spirito joined Ben Massarella of Perishable Records, engineer Brian Deck, and a broad supporting cast of musician friends - all of whom play a hefty list of instruments - to form Orso's original lineup.
Orso released its self-titled debut album on Perishable in 1999. Following its first release, the band gained a fourth core member, multi-instrumentalist Gillian Lisee. Orso completed Long Time By, its second album, on Perishable this year. Although both records were created by essentially the same set of folks, the processes involved in producing each of them differed drastically.
Spirito recalls the prevailing spirit of the first Orso record: "With Rex records, people thought, `Wow, you did this on a 4-track?' It wasn't that we were out to make our records on a 4-track; we always worked with whatever gear we could afford, or whatever we already had around. With the first Orso record it was the same: we borrowed a 11/44-inch reel-to-reel machine and some other gear from friends out here, and then drove all of it out to Ben's house in Indiana, about an hour away.
"So we started to record out there at Ben's," says Spirito, "and most of the basic tracks were done when the tape we were using started to fall apart. We watched as pieces of the tape fell off the reel. So we immediately took the machine to a studio here in town and transferred the tracks to ADAT. We rented an ADAT to finish the record; it was kind of thrown together. Still, Brian was able to take tons of different kinds of gear, old and new, and spit out that record, which I think has a pretty unique sound."
During the interim between the first and second Orso albums, Deck and Massarella worked to finish the renovation of a space that they leased together on the first floor of a Chicago apartment building. It was a multicar garage that would eventually house Perishable Records' headquarters and Deck's Clava recording studio.
Recording Long Time By at Clava required that the band abandon the "elementary school" style of recording that they had developed for the first record. Instead, they recorded 16-track basics onto 2-inch tape and used Deck's Digidesign Pro Tools/24 Mixplus system. "It was heaven," says Spirito, "but it was also different. Instead of taking a more hands-on approach, such as running a signal through an effects box, Brian would change a sound by using a plug-in in Pro Tools. I wondered for a while if the recording would sound too clean, but I'm really happy with how the album turned out."
One thing about the band's recording process that did not change was the final stage in which all of the elements were balanced. "Brian tends to go into overdrive while we're mixing," says Spirito. "He changes his focus from getting the sounds to record well to actually taking the music and transforming it into a finished product. And with Pro Tools this time out, we were able to go further with the electronic end of Orso."

Long Time By
a review by dan hill
This is the second album from the trio called Orso, and a delightful discovery for me. There's some beautiful music here, the pure, ravishing simplicity of the American vernacular reaffirmed yet again by this woven tapestry of piano, banjo, violin, guitar and percussion. It's the basic sound of European folk dances, refracted through 200 years of America's endless spaces and sudden pressures. I guess it's the sound of the stretching, warping, and tearing of numerous immigrant cultural fabrics, when pinned across a landscape suddenly vast, limitless in scale and ambition. Somehow, I'm reminded of the warm, humane, and gently deep resonances of slow, meandering American journeys, such as David Lynch's "The Straight Story", and indeed Jonathan Raban's brilliant book "Bad Land", concerning exactly that tension of the human scale forcibly planted within the vastness of the mid-West. There's a space, history, and dignity to the sounds Orso play with, no matter how ramshackle. The band also have a sophisticated side which isn't afraid of studio jiggery-pokery, providing echoed aural curios in tracks like "Conference Room", the endearingly unhinged "Logs#1", and the wheezing steampunk "Slight Return", sounding somewhat like Raban's 19th century railroad snaking across Montana. Amidst all the warmly humorous, appealing tunes, there's occasionally room for a hint of Badlands Texas Chainsaw Blair Witch Deliverance menace - ragged shreds of noise draped in the shadows at the back of the shack, eerie curlicues skittering around the bulrushes.
However, lest I get too po-faced here, this is also a grinning, downright-fun record. Most of all, there's a bunch of songs here. Songs to sing along with. Phil Spirito's songs in fact. He wrote the words, takes the lead vocals, and indulges in much guitar/banjo action. Gillian Lisee takes keyboards, guitars, banjos and vocals in hand, and Ben Massarella drums. They're the basic tools at hand, but the roll-call of noise-makers used on the album is almost endless ("melodica, piano strings, rattling and shaking, office chair, tuning pegs, glass, 55 gallon drum" etc.). And they're joined, such is the way of these things, by an itinerant band of musicians including Brian Deck's electronics and mixing, Tim Rutili's guitar and piano, Duke Lee on glockenspiel and duketronics(!), Julie Liu on viola, Greg Ratajczak's Fender VI, and Kelly McCracken on cello, all or none of whom may or may not have played in some or several other Perishable bands, possibly for example Rex, Red Red Meat, Califone and HIM.
Tom Waits is clearly a touchstone, and why not? The shambolic, vaudeville songs recall the folksier, carnival freakshow side to Waits ouvre, and whilst Spirito's idiosyncratic baritone will put some off, for me it shares with Waits' voice a richly-smoked, growling depth and gently wayward approach to melody. Like early Springsteen for that matter ("Wild Billy's Circus Story" anyone?). Though occasionally arch, Spirito is utterly engaging, particularly on ballads such as the truly lovely "Well" or "Circle R". Waits' resourceful rural approach to sound-making is also present - elsewhere Dirty Three or Yo La Yengo might spring to mind - yet the sound is really all Orso's. It's a wholly successful attempt to draw the honest charm of Americana into 2000, and it's great.
Posted by dan hill at 00:00, 14 Nov 2000

#777oRSo is the project of ex-rex member and oft-time HiM and Loftus contributor Phil Spirito. After a series of releases for Perishable Records, oRSo has teamed up with Contraphonic in this year of their decennial celebration. oRSo's previous release, My Dreams Are Back and They Are Better Than Ever, earned nearly universal acclaim and saw the band opening for Califone on extended domestic and Italian tours. Building upon that success, oRSo's hypnotic mix of tenor banjos, soft organs, muted brass, and calm harmonies are in full force on the majestic Ask Your Neighbor. It's like taking a walk in the woods with music dripping off every leaf passed by.
After a childhood of playing drums and percussion, as well as learning guitar and bass, Phil Spirito took an abbreviated trip to music school before moving to Portland, Maine, where he played bass and fronted many bands that have long since been forgotten. Spending time working as a DJ at Portland's community radio station, WMPG, Spirito branched out from the classic rock of his youth, discovering (and becoming obsessed with) world and experimental music. This is when his lifelong admiration of Captain Beefheart started. After 10 years of playing many different kinds of music (rock, jazz, experimental, improv, world) in Maine's small music scene, Phil was invited to New York to play bass with some old friends. He jumped at the chance, and in 1994, they started the band rex.
rex went on to record for Southern Records. It was at this time, towards the end of rex's history, that Phil started to have ideas about starting his own project. Those ideas were developed even further when rex toured with Red Red Meat. There was a fast and super meeting of musical minds and many friendships were born on that tour. In 1996, rex and Red Red Meat joined together once again to record the Loftus album. We hear the first seeds of Spirito's new musical ideas in some of the Loftus recordings. Phil had been playing banjo once in a while, but it was during those Loftus sessions that he started to play more frequently. On the last rex tour, Phil bought his first tenor guitar, a purchase that helped begin to round out the true oRSo sound. This four-stringed mini-guitar, the banjo, and tenor banjo have since become the musical core of oRSo. That winter, Phil traveled to Chicago recruiting Julie Lui, Ben Masserella and Brian Deck to play and record oRSo's first self-titled album. oRSo: version one and the Binto Family were born.
The first oRSo album was released in the fall of 1998. It was at this time that Phil began to form his theory of music shells. The idea is this: Phil writes the tunes on his instrument of choice and then finds musicians that he can trust to fill out, with some guidance, the already formed shells. Subsequent versions have been formed by bringing together musicians who, as a group, can best paint the oRSo vision no matter how abstract.
Phil was still bringing in his shells, but over time the different versions of oRSo led to an incredible group chemistry that fostered the writing of songs as a unit, something that has become more frequent as time passed. To date there have been six versions of oRSo that have recorded three albums, with the most recent group including Libby Reed on keyboards (and back-up harmonies) as the core member of version six, as well as Rob Stephenson on guitar and Dylan Ryan on vibes.
Ask Your Neighbor was recorded over three years at oRSo's home studio and at Four Deuces with Jim McGranahan, and it was mixed with Griffin Rodriguez (Icy Demons, Bablicon) at Shape Shoppe. The evolving line-up of oRSo continues on this release, with contributions from Tim Rutilli, Jim Becker and Ben Massarella (Califone), Nick Macri (The Zincs), and others, including full-fledged oRSo member Libby Reed (Coat). In 2008, Contraphonic will also be releasing a series of digital-only albums combing the oRSo archives, and there will be exclusive engagements in Los Angeles and Chicago with accompanying film(s) by Phil Spirito.

Orso is an experimental, folk-tinged band led by Rex's Phil Spirito, Red Red Meat's Brian Deck, and Califone's Ben Massarella. Featuring banjo-centered songs flushed out by non-traditional instruments such as typewriters and toilets, the band made its studio debut in 1999 with a self-titled album on Perishable Records. Long Time By, a much more focused effort, followed in 2000, and My Dreams Are Back and They Are Better Than Ever arrived four years later. Ask Your Neighbor........... marked the band's first effort for Contraphonic, a Chicago-based label, in 2008.
Jason Nickey