Sunday, December 14, 2008

Sir Richard Bishop

Over the course of twenty-five years and almost a hundred records, astral-weirdos the Sun City Girls proved as prolific as they were unclassifiable, a kind of shadow stalking through the American underground doing whatever they pleased. Less a band than a hydra-headed social experiment, the Girls mashed wildly different passions — ritual theatre, improv, ethnic music, vulgar Americana — into a lurid stew of uncompromising weirdness, leaving a discography that reads like the rantings of someone in a fever dream.  

And then there were the shows. Sun City Girls gigs were riot-baiting, dadaist exercises in patience, occasionally punctuated by spiky, freeform songs. From their first appearances at punk open mic nights in Phoenix in the early 80s, the Girls considered performance as something entirely spontaneous, more a confrontation with people’s expectations than an attempt to satisfy them. If they pissed people off, says former Sun City Girl and solo guitarist Sir Richard Bishop, the more the better.  

‘We knew right away that what we were playing wasn’t going to be popular with the young punk crowds,’ he says, via e-mail, of their beginnings. ‘They were pretty one-dimensional when it came to the music they liked. So when we noticed how much anger we were generating, it gave us a feeling of power. We fed off of it, and we ate well! The more they hated us, the more inspired we were.’

By the time they played what proved to be their swan song at the Volksbühne last year — drummer Charles Gocher succumbing to cancer just weeks after — they’d celebrated a quarter century of public nuisance.

‘I think most bands would have called it quits if they went through this as long as we did, but for us it was the best thing that could have happened. We found ourselves pushing ever harder in order to make the crowd feel uncomfortable at those shows. And at the same time we were developing new musical ideas that were just way over their heads and they couldn’t handle it. We really had fun with it, and never once did we give in. We always finished our set and left the stage with a great feeling of accomplishment.’

For all their caustic trickery, the Girls were disarmingly great musicians. They just didn’t want to stay in the one place long enough to let on. Sir Richard, touring Berlin this month on the back of his sixth solo record, plays the kind of virtuosic, multilingual guitar that speaks the Girls’ legacy in a clearer voice — Indian ragas and narcoleptic drones sit side by side flamenco excursions and oud-ish steel stringery, all of it spun together with wild, elastic runs of his own creation.

Bishop’s love for the East runs deep. Growing up in Michigan, Bishop’s grandfather initiated he and his brother Alan into what he calls ‘Arabic high art’, playing him old middle-eastern instruments and Oum Kalthoum tapes. As soon as they were old enough Bishop and fellow Girl Alan started traveling the East relentlessly, sometimes for six months at a time, picking up influences, gamelan orchestras, masks and voices as most people do postcards, playing stray gigs on Indonesian cruise ships as they went.

‘I still try to get to Asia every couple of years if I can and I usually try to stay two or three months,’ he says. ‘If I had more money I would stay much longer.’ On his journeys, music takes a back seat. ‘I might jam with the locals if I have an opportunity but that’s about it. There’s so much more to do over there that playing music is usually the last thing on my mind.’

Those expecting audience baiting, masks and gibberish at his shows might be a little disappointed. ‘When I play solo there’s usually no problems,’ he says. ‘I’m not playing anything quite as far out as when the band played.’

Polytheistic Fragments, his most recent LP, saw a move to a bigger label Drag City, and some broader brushstrokes. Bishop still moves through styles and obsessions at a rate faster than you can recognize them, as likely to break out into back-porch swing as a gypsy freakout. But for those for whom the Girls were always a bit too far out in the ether, Bishop’s new record — as open-eyed and accessible as anything he’s ever done — is a great entry point to the Girls’ fourth dimension.  

After a career that has explored much of the manifest cosmos, Bishop shows no signs of slowing down. ‘I’m getting a little tired of just playing the acoustic guitar,’ he admits. ‘So I’ll probably start playing electric guitar more, just for a change. Or maybe I’ll become a noise artist, twiddle a few knobs, push a few buttons, and just stand there like something’s really going on. All the kids are doing it!’  
 

Originally published in Exberliner Magazine, February 2008

Recently

• • Four Records From The (Almost) Canon
  • Four remarkable, little-heard records from two depressed Kiwis, a deep listening scholar, some truly radical post-punkers and a couple of Arizona desert rats. There's more.
• • Antony and the Johnsons: The Crying Light
  • A review of Antony and the Johnson's 2009 lp The Crying Light, published in The Big Issue. There's more.
• • Sir Richard Bishop
  • Bishop still moves through styles and obsessions at a rate faster than you can recognize them, as likely to break out into back-porch swing as a gypsy freakout. But for those for whom the Girls were always a bit too far out in the ether, Bishop's new record -- as open-eyed and accessible as anything he's ever done -- is a great entry point to the Girls' fourth dimension. There's more.
• • Deerhoof
  • Listening to Deerhoof, San Francisco's wonderfully manic noise-pop trio, you often get the feeling you're playing with a child's toy, one that is all sweetness and smiles, and then, all of a sudden, sprouts a new head. There's more.
• • Popol Vuh: Mika Vainio / Haswell & Hecker Remixes 12"
  • Popol Vuh's cavernous, immense drone is foreboding, as you would expect, but, pieced together from loops of a choir, it is also possessed of an otherworldly, almost transcendent quality, one that elevates the film into greatness before the conquistadors even reach the river. If there has been a better contribution to a film soundtrack since, or a better collaboration between a filmmaker and musician at the peaks of their respective careers, I haven't heard it. There's more.
• • Volcano the Bear: Amidst the Noise and Twigs
  • For the celebrated British four-piece, now twelve-years young and piling up a heady discography, setting out with such a consciously wide, undefined scope means moments of unabashed prettiness (the almost saccharine vocal coda to 'Before We Came to This Religion') are as much flotsam as artless noise (the ceaseless overdriven yelling of 'One Hundred Years of Infamy'), all of it to be run through, played with, discarded anyhow. There's more.