Bill Orcutt - The Four Louies - VINYL LP

2025 repress. In 1957, R&B singer Richard Berry scrawled a few crude stanzas on a strip of toilet paper, and chant-sung them in fake patois over a shuffling rhythm to capitalize on the Latin craze tearing up the charts. InchLouie LouieInch didn't make much of a dent in the national consciousness in it's first iteration, but when Berry and the Pharaohs took the song on the road up and down the West Coast, it became something of a regional sensation. In 1962, the Kingsmen carved their mush-mouthed, barely-pubescent first take of the nascent standard into acetate. The resulting 45 was a mega-hit (although Berry remained a pauper until legal wrangling finally made him rich shortly before his death in 1997). No one could quite decipher the words, so grown-ups assumed the worst, and the resulting hysteria culminated in an FBI obscenity investigation and trial (InchUnintelligible at any speed,Inch concluded the judge). The countless cover versions that followed the original hit mangled the song's blurry text into guesstimated verse with varying shades of angst and filthiness.Less than a decade later, Steve Reich's Four Organs (built from a stacked dominant-11th chord with wayward pitches gradually trickling out either side like pancake syrup) made it's concert debut. It's introductory staccato fanfare poleaxed unsuspecting uptown highbrows in an almost rockist fashion, and while the piece was tolerated by the art mob, Reich's work didn't fare so well in uptown concert halls. At a Carnegie Hall performance in 1971, one listener repeatedly slammed her head into the stage, shouting InchStop, stop, I confess!Inch Nonetheless, the work's relentless progression, melting into Farfisa dreamscapes, would eventually inspire some of the most palatable manifestations of American minimalism.Bill Orcutt's latest for Fake Estates, his ongoing opus of obsessive rearrangement, seamlessly m