Bill Orcutt - The Four Louies LP

You’ve heard Run-DMC and Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” you’ve heard Linkin Park & Jay-Z’s “Numb/Encore”, hell you may have even heard DJ Earworm’s United State of Pop 2009 in some cheesy email chain or around the school yard a decade and a half ago. Bill Orcutt’s got another for the pantheon of mash-ups with “The Four Louies.”

Taking a foundational cornerstone of rock music in Chuck Berry/The Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” and the early Minimalism of Steve Reich’s Four Organs as his source material, Orcutt cuts together two pieces that take cues from the compositional techniques of the other.

Side 1 is the rockin’ side, with Berry’s riff looped ad nauseam in a pretty straight matter, with Reich’s organs and maracas laid over the top. The rhythmic organ stabs and percussion of the latter almost serve as a call and response to the latin-inspired rhythms of the former before descending into chordal drones that almost evoke the organ in The VU’s “What Goes On” (or if you wanna get really rockin’ the bagpipes in ACDC’s “It’s A Long Way To The Top”).

Flip it over and you get the opposite: Reich’s compositional principals applied to rock music. Yet again just using the riff and the organs, Louie Louie gradually refracts and splinters apart becoming an interlocking network of pinging guitars, the iconic riff reduced to it’s base elements as just a series of notes.

As someone who was once accused of applying a ‘rockist’ lens to experimental music, I can’t get enough of this!
-Mitch