2025 repress. "Bill Orcutt is of course famous for his bluesy free improv acoustic guitar playing, which he has been performing since he re-emerged with the 2009 solo album A New Way To Pay Old Debts, 12 years after the dissolution of his seminal noise rock band Harry Pussy. He has also held down day jobs as a software engineer at various Silicon Valley companies for the last two decades.Apart from certain errant excursions such as Harry Pussy’s final album Let’s Build A Pussy, which consists of Orcutt timestretching a second of the voice of Harry Pussy drummer Adris Hoyos into an hour, and notwithstanding the fact that since 2011 his albums have been released by electronic music label Editions Mego, there was previously a marked divergence between the computers of Orcutt’s career and the eschewal of digital manipulation in the uncompromisingly visceral playing of his vocation, in which the pluck of every string is palpable. This changed in 2016, when he released the avowedly primitive open source live coding audio program Cracked, which consists only of a window in which commands are typed.Since then, Orcutt has been intermittently releasing music made with the app on his DIY label Fake Estates, A Mechanical Joey being the latest. Its two sides comprise one continuous track, lasting 35 minutes in total, during which Orcutt creates the illusion that a sample of Joey Ramone counting in a song accompanied by drumbeats is moving forwards and backwards in space. It is a sequel of...
LP $24.00
05/30/2025
2025 repress. "Bill Orcutt’s latest 'counting' album, The Anxiety of Symmetry, completes a trilogy on his Fake Estates label that started with Pure Genius (2020) and A Mechanical Joey (2021), all realized with his own Cracked computer music software. Comprising two 15-minute-long improvisations, the album’s terrain is limited to six samples of female voices singing the number of the corresponding note value in the first six pitches of a major scale. These are fashioned into compact phrases (1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, etc.) that are looped and layered. As the loops combine in multiple permutations and cycles, their uneven lengths create polyrhythms and syncopations as well as harmonies. On the surface, Anxiety is unusually placid for Orcutt, reminiscent of Minimal classics like the 'Knee Plays' of Phillip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach (which also features sung numbers, although without the one-to-one relationship between pitch and interval number) and the breathy soprano voice loops in '2/1' from Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. However, the album’s title is adapted from Orcutt’s essay of the same name in the Spectres III anthology about a compulsive behavioral condition known as 'Just Right' and its parallels and possible applications to music, which suggests that this titular music’s inspiration is not trance- inducement, but rather a kind of mental obsession with ordering and re-ordering. In the essay, Orcutt posits that 'for the ‘Just Right’ subject composing or performing with the computer, the fixation with repetition, symmetry and arrangement in sound can be mediated with software, creating new prospects...
LP $24.00
05/30/2025
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. "Louie Louie" didn't make much of a dent in the national consciousness in its 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 ("Unintelligible at any speed," 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 its concert debut. Its 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...
LP $24.00
05/30/2025