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Bill Orcutt, "Four Louies Live"
Despite being a fairly devout Bill Orcutt fan for the last decade or so, I never followed his Fake Estates imprint too closely until recently, as it seemed to exclusively be a destination for his most mischievous, obtuse, and unapologetically indulgent ideas. Over the last few years, however, the imprint has blossomed into the home for an increasingly audacious and endearingly demented series of software experiments and batshit crazy conceptual releases that bear almost zero resemblance to his more celebrated guitar releases yet feel every bit as essential.
Fake Estates
While _A Mechanical Joey_ remains my clear favorite among his Fake Estates forays, _The Four Louies_ (2024) stands as an equally bananas example of Orcutt's cracked vision, as he gleefully mashed up two very different primitive, iconic, and polarizing pieces of music: the Kingsmen’s slurred and incomprehensible frat party anthem “Louie Louie” and the punishingly repetitive chord deconstruction of Steve Reich’s “Four Organs.” Admittedly, I could not get into the relentless plunderphonic repetition of _The Four Louies_ at the time of its release much, but Orcutt has ingeniously managed to breathe new life into the piece with this raucous performance from last March, as his star-studded live band improbably transformed the simplest riff of all time into raw, roaring, and ecstatic drone freak-out.
