The Four Louies vinyl

San Francisco-based experimentalist Bill Orcutt pushes further into his self-styled minimal rock terrain with this new release on Fake Estates, his second full-length of 2025. Built around two tracks, 'The Four Louies I' and 'II', it splices Steve Reich's 'Four Organs' with the distorted ghost of Richard Berry's 'Louie Louie', reimagining both as pulsing, off-key suites of feedback, Farfisa drone and fractured rhythm. It's raw but surprisingly meditative: Reich's famously static harmonic structure folds around the mangled spirit of garage rock, with Orcutt teasing out weird resonances between proto-punk and process music. The sound shifts between hypnotic and deranged, balancing reverence and noise. You catch snatches of the Kingsmen's slack energy; then it unravels into metallic squall. There's humour and precision here, but also real intuition i a freeform rock album that wrings unexpected emotion from two of the most misunderstood works of postwar America. It doesn't so much bridge high and low art as short-circuit them. With this latest release, Orcutt adds another dissonant jewel to a catalogue that never stops interrogating what music is even for.