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LP
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FAKE 015LP
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$26.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 4/3/2026
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 time-stretching 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 sorts to Pure Genius, another release by Orcutt made on Cracked, which consists of various computer-generated voices counting, accompanied by bleeps ascending the chromatic scale. The blurb for that record claims that it was borne of the fact that 'while stuck out on the left coast surrounded by braying tech bros,' Orcutt 'realized that we, the plebs, will eventually be here only to serve the machines'. But perhaps the return of the human voice on A Mechanical Joey is his indication that we might be able to resist after all." --Daniel Neofetou
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LP
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FAKE 017LP
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$26.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 4/3/2026
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). 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 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 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 for both therapeutic engagement with their compulsions and the creation of music with a length, density and scale not possible without machines. The Anxiety of Symmetry might then be comparable to artist Hanne Darboven's quasi-Minimal compositions and their basis in odd mathematical calculations derived from the calendar, in taking its cue from an extra-musical process. The two pieces' polyphony is not far off from Orcutt's recent Music for Four Guitars, but also marks Anxiety as a departure from both Pure Genius and A Mechanical Joey. The latter bypassed melody and harmony altogether; its relentless, phantasmagorical looping and subdivisions of Joey Ramone's trademark onstage count-offs could be seen as a wry comment on the repetitions within repetitions of rock songs and their ongoing performances, or simply the monomania of years of touring for months on end. Anxiety collapses Pure Genius' juxtaposition of pitch and counting by having the numbers sung. Stripped down yet excessive (in the tradition of his other works with Cracked), Anxiety seems less like its predecessors' deconstructions than a new kind of subversive easy listening." --Alan Licht
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LP
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FAKE 018LP
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$26.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 4/3/2026
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. 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 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 into the stage, shouting 'Stop, stop, I confess!' 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 release for Fake Estates, his ongoing opus of obsessive rearrangement, seamlessly melds these audio landmarks. Fittingly, Reich described Four Organs as 'the longest V-I cadence in the history of Western Music,' and as such, it neatly envelops all of Louie Louie within its single chord. Intuiting this, Orcutt deftly overlays the opening salvos of these sonic cognates into a zig-zagging 4/4 cadence, which unfolds over side one with an incongruously conventional rock dynamic structure. The Four Organs' sustained organ threads suggest Louie Louie's vocal line, whether by accident or Orcutt's design. Taken together, Louie Louie and The Four Organs represent key signposts in musical evolution: proto-punk, proto new age; reviled by the squares, yet efficacious in blowing forward-looking minds."
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