BLACK PUS – the one-masked-man-band of Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale – oozes up for a surprise gig.

Riding a river of raw energy, B.Chip pulls in all he can to the freeform tumble and rumble – as a drummer, a singer, a synther, an oscillator manipulator! On Terrestrial Seethings – his latest LP on Thrill Jockey – he “takes his place as master conjurer uncovering new levels of distorted bliss, a howling mage reveling in the thrall of deranged loops, percussive wailing and warped synthesizers.” This will be the first Black Pus gig in L.A. in more than a decade; come catch the current.

Plus GUCK – an L.A. quintet bringing the noise-rock and song-form. With singing strong and core to the flow, this Three One G unit executes heavy punktuations, while synth and feedback squeal aflitter. They also totally groove, so come cut a rug.

And KIM FUCK – a solo proj from artist and instigator Jools Rothblatt, who waxes lyrical over thump and throb. The bargain will be more live than ever this gig around with bass guitar and drum machine operators joining in the situation.

Your DJ for the night is the inimitable California punk lifer, comedian, and Zum Audio don George Chen.

And it all goes down at the well kept corner of underground that is Non Plus Ultra.

Advance tickets strongly encouraged.

Flyer by Brian Chippendale

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 The 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 Hassell, 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. The 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.

Poster by Bill Orcutt

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