Fake Estates

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.

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.

The performance took place at Brooklyn’s Roulette Intermedium as part of a three-day residency of Palilalia artists, so Orcutt had quite a dazzling number of talented collaborators on hand that included ringers like William Wynant, Alan Licht, and Mari Rubio in addition to the expected guitar quartet and label contingents. The large ensemble, drolly dubbed both “an Orcuttstra” and “Kingsreich” by Licht, consisted of six organs (mostly played by non-organists), a rock trio (Gumby’s Junk), noise artist Brian Day, and drummer Chris Corsano (with Wynant gamely handling the all-important “maraca” role). 

The thread connecting “Louie Louie” and “Four Organs,” is of course the fact that the two pieces each feature an extremely minimal and repetitive organ motif. While the non-lyrical substance of “Louie Louie” is extremely easy to grasp, the austere and mechanical-sounding “Four Organs” is quite a different story altogether. In essence, it is just a single obsessively repeating dominant 11th chord, but that chord gradually becomes distended and deconstructed into its four components as its duration is incrementally increased. 

To my ears, “Four Organs” is probably the most punishingly one-dimensional piece that Reich ever recorded and I am apparently not alone in that, as one early audience member reportedly started banging her head against the stage while shouting “Stop, stop, I confess!” during a Carnegie Hall performance. Had I been born a bit earlier, that person very well might have been me, as “Four Organs” feels like someone relentlessly overexplaining a simple idea that they are monomaniacally fixated upon. That said, “Louie Louie” had its share of detractors as well, as its indecipherable lyrics were the subject of an FBI obscenity investigation which ultimately concluded that the piece was “unintelligible at any speed.”  

To Orcutt’s credit, the more madness-inducing aspects of “Four Organs” are significantly diminished by its collision with the rhythm and additional chords of “Louie Louie.” However, I would still unhesitatingly describe Orcutt’s mash up of the two pieces as “willfully and amusingly annoying.” Thankfully, however, it is quite a bit more than that as well and this live version is where “The Four Louies” breaks free of its clever “conceptual exercise” origins to become a transcendent feat of punk-as-fuck minimalism. Achievements like that are exactly why I love Orcutt so much, as he regularly finds soul and beauty in the unlikeliest of places and seems to delight in doing things the hard way, the wrong way, or both. This album definitely falls quite squarely into the “both” category, as its disorienting timing requirements make a live performance a fiendishly complex feat to pull off (and one that absolutely requires a shit-hot maraca player, of course).

As was the case with The Four Louies, Four Louies Live consists of two variations. In the first, the Kingsmen’s central riff remains intact for the entire piece while the Reichian component slowly breaks apart to form a heaving and panning squall of quavering organ drones. There are some welcome enhancements to the piece this time around, however, as the live performance nicely ratchets up the rawness and intensity of the original and Day and Orcutt gamely inject a bit more unpredictability and instability into the piece. Also, to borrow some cringe-inducing funk parlance, the organists were free to “put some stank on it,” so there is a liberating looseness and personality to the performance as well. Then, in the superior second piece, it is the “Louie Louie” riff that incrementally disappears beneath an oscillating maelstrom of droning organ until the piece gloriously condenses into a pounding, monolithic roar. 

Notably, I stumbled upon an unexpected “control group” this week, as Water Damage obsessively repeat a single iconic Stooges’ riff on Repair’s “Reel 43” as the foundation for a droning cacophony of their own. My question, of course, was “were all of Orcutt’s mathematical time contortions worth it or did Water Damage effortlessly get to exactly the same place without them?” As it turns out, Orcutt’s quixotic approach legitimately did make a huge difference by both sharpening the focus and creating a propulsive sense of accelerating incremental change.

While it admittedly took a couple of tries to get it right, Orcutt’s unwavering belief in the piece (and the Herculean effort involved in performing it live) were absolutely justified, as Four Louies Live not only successfully transforms an absurdist joke into high art but also manages to transform a time-bending math puzzle into something that feels like the culminating event of a long and wild career as well. While I have no doubt at all that Orcutt will soon come up with something even more unique and compelling, it certainly seemed like everyone who was at the Roulette Intermedium that night had their mind properly blown in the most leftfield way imaginable.

Listen here.