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Bill Orcutt’s The Four Louies brings together two masterpieces of 20th century Farfisa minimalism – The Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” and Steve Reich’s “Four Organs” – through a head-spinning series of cut-up segments accompanied by maracas and a rhythm section, transcribed from the digital file for live performance. Oakland art rockers Gumby’s Junk open with their circus math punk genre mishmash.
As one of experimental music's most influential guitarists, Bill Orcutt weaves looping melodic lines and angular attack into a dense, fissured landscape of American primitivism, outsider jazz, and a stripped-down re-envisioning of the possibilities of the guitar. Whether he's playing his decrepit Kay acoustic or gutted electric Telecaster (both stripped of two of their strings, as has been Orcutt's custom since the 1980's), Orcutt's jagged sound is utterly unique and instantly recognizable, compared with equal frequency to avant-garde composers and rural bluesmen. The New York Times has called him "a go-for-broke guitar improviser," and described his sound as "articulated sprays of arpeggiated chords and dissonance."
Although known best as a guitarist, Bill Orcutt has a prolific sideline using digital software to create head-spinning process music where mathematics are no less important than sound itself. But he began cross-pollinating those interests with his 2024 album The Four Louies, an improbable, inventive collision of two landmark 20th century works built around the organ. The Farfisa defines the definitive version of the garage rock staple “Louie Louie” by Portland’s Kingsmen. The 1963 hit is driven by an indelible staccato organ riff that cycles all through the brilliantly primitive song. Seven years later Steve Reich composed his early minimalist classic Four Organs, in which an array of lengthening chords overlap in shifting combinations, driven for the entirety of its fifteen-plus minutes by a steady pulse played on a pair of maracas. On Four Louies Orcutt crafted a remarkable marriage of the two pieces which, in theory, couldn’t seem further apart. He didn’t merely bring the two pieces together, but he essentially recomposed them into something new through accretion and subtraction, doubling certain lines in different channels or repeating others only to make them vanish sixteen bars later. What might suggest a novelty on paper brings a mix of raw power and intricate arrangement to loudspeakers, unceremoniously knocking down any borders between punk, experimental, and new music.
Orcutt has started to perform pieces from his digital oeuvre, and he’s decided to translate the Four Louies hybrid for live instrumentation in 2025, assembling a kind of meticulously synchronized double quartet to simultaneously address the two separate compositional sources, while forging something entirely new from the basic building blocks. Of course, it’s possible that the line-up might be even larger, depending on where the juggernaut lands. With Orcutt as the mad conductor (and guitarist), two different groupings of players will perform his chopped-up and remade version of the Kingsmen and Reich pieces, with grimy garage tradition duly represented by Orcutt himself and the new music part of the equation presided over by Bay Area legend William Winant (a true legend who’s not only worked closely with Jon Hassel, John Zorn, Annea Lockwood, Roscoe Mitchell, and Sonic Youth, but who previously toured in Reich’s ensemble), who will shake maracas with marathon stamina. Orcutt’s expects performances to be acts of reinvention and transformation, with the musicians latching onto the most repetitive passages and letting them rip, pulled in by the music’s ecstatic magnetism. This is particularly true during the drone section of Reich’s piece, as the ensemble promises to bust through the fixed harmonic forms to generate something wide open and psychedelic. Four Louies may seek to balance two disparate traditions structurally, but the live shows will absolutely tilt toward the in-the-red fury of the Kingsmen, bringing a decidedly visceral, high octane attack to the work. Depending on the performance space, the musicians will likely form a large circle in the room, facing one another as they zoom off into infinity.
Oakland based art rock band Gumby’s Junk began in 2018 as a complete mishap. Pushing musical surrealism to its limits with outrageous harmonies, circus-fast riffs, and genre mishmash, they have been described as oblique, colorful madness and like you are running fast and looking at the ground. After you listen, you’ll know that when they ring the bell, you get a treat.
Opening for touring acts like Omni, Godcaster, and Snõõper, Gumby’s Junk has built a devoted cult following with their high-octane performances. Their upcoming 2025 release, Business & Pleasure, mixed by Greg Saunier (Deerhoof), captures their sonic maximalism through feverish grooves, a tragic Western ballad, and oblique rhythmic textures.