Here's an all too brief introduction to this terrific new Bay Area band. These four boys churn out three fiery indie rock tunes with loads of energy, angst and passion. Birdmonster's music has frequently been compared to that of Modest Mouse, and we can definitely hear why (particularly in the vocal department), but they're actually far more rootsy and boot-stompin'. Probably pretty great live! Even from just this handful of songs, their finely tuned songcraft is more than apparent. A very promising debut.
Birds & Batteries kick off their debut album with a solid cover of Neil Young's "Heart Of Gold". It's a bit of an odd decision, but we guess it serves to illustrate an inspiration jumping off point for this SF band. Similar to that unpredictable Canadian singer/songwriter, B&B main man Mike Sempert has crafted a comfy blend of pop, traditional acoustic folk and country rock that is not without its share of gentle non-traditional twists. He seems to favor the latter a little more so here than on the previous Birds & Batteries cd-r release Nature Vs. Nature which interwove a rootsy singer/songwriter perspective with electronica and post rock elements. It's far more composed and cohesive. Nonetheless he keeps us on our toes, fleshing out and deepening some of the songs' timeless earthy folk atmospheres and melodies with occasional synth keyboard lines and textures. Sempert's songwriting is confident and engaging with lyrics drifting from the daydream-y contemplative to the yearningly melancholic. Highlights include the instrumental "Jungles (Oceans)" as well as "Star Clusters" and "Soft Surveillance".
Ah folks, proof that you shouldn't judge a book (or cd) by its cover! When Mike Sempert first dropped off a copy of this new release of his solo project Birds & Batteries its appearance (cover art, title, handmade sleeves, etc) initially struck us as perhaps a Jewelled Antler related or inspired release. Listening to it brought very different impressions. Blending together rootsy Americana, post-rock and electronica, the first song's stuttery programmed rhythms and hypnotic loops of arpeggiated melodies contrast well with Sempert's deep, melancholic vocals and guitar, bass and drums. Winding its way around the proceedings are some slippery stringy sounds that we guess is pedal steel or an e-bowed electric guitar or perhaps a synthesizer. He also enlists his friends to contribute saxophone, clarinet, female vocals (by Ms Heather Masse) and percussion in the form of a box of sugar! A very cool introduction to this recent SF transplant (from the far reaches of the Eastern Seaboard)!
Birds of Avalon, the name makes us think of some sort of jazz fusion band, or maybe a RenFaire folk outfit, don't it? Nope, neither is the case. So, whatta we got here? Well friends, put pure and simple, we've got some real deal, real catchy CLASSIC rock done really really well, featuring the married (!) guitar duo of Cheetie Kumar and Paul Siler, both formerly of AC/DCish R&B rockers the Cherry Valence from Raleigh, North Carolina. This new band of theirs is equally retro and even more proggily awesome than their old one. It's '70s style, yeah, in the vein of Led Zep, Cheap Trick, Thin Lizzy and Southern stuff like the Allman Brothers. Should therefore also appeal to fans of current acts like Drunk Horse and Queens Of The Stone Age -- and, with the twin guitar harmonies that shine strong throughout this 11-tracker, moments could even be mistaken for the dual guitar heroics of Slough Feg. Though, you wouldn't call 'em metal. Meanwhile, the singer dude's vocals are expressive and melodic, he's possessed of soaring higher register pipes that will remind you at times of Robert Plant -- or even a non-ironic, less over-the-top version of that guy from The Darkness.
Thus armed, their songs range from full on riff rockin' heaviness to spacey, keyboard adorned psych -- always with those glorious guitar harmonies, and a more than competent pop component. A track like "Superpower" is typical of their energetic, guitar-driven '70ish verve, while we also dig on the mellower, moodier numbers like "Turn Gold" and "Instant Coma" that remind us of a heavy lidded Sabbath, a la "Planet Caravan".
More pop-minded fans of The Fucking Champs (pals of these guys by the way, as the Champs, and Drunk Horse too, always used to play shows with the Cherry Valence) who love it when the usually-instrumental Champs do one of their all-too rare vocal numbers, ought to really dig Birds Of Avalon. Oh, and they bring it live -- we've seen 'em and if they come through on tour, wherever you are, check 'em out. Our prediction: this debut will someday be considered a classic of retro-classic rock!
This North Carolina band's debut last year, Bazaar Bazaar, we hailed as a brand new classic of, uh, classic rock. Super '70s yet super fresh too, with their kick ass combo of hard rock and power pop, fueled by killer twin guitar harmonies and fronted by a lead singer with the looks and the lungs of rock gods of daze past. Yep, if anyone's still making truly classic rock, these guys (and gal) are. They're on tour opening for the Raconteurs as we write this, a perfect match though we wouldn't be surprised if the Birds blow the headliners off the stage every night...
So, to tide us over 'til they've got a new full length, here's an ep, six new tracks, both badass and breezy, Birds Of Avalon always making it look easy... If anything, the blissful pop quota has been upped, with "Hazy 98" in particular sounding pretty darn Beatlesy. Elsewhere, they let the guitars lay it on thick and heavy, with "The Reeds" perhaps being the proggiest bit of asskickery (or vice versa) on this sweet lil' disc.
So again, we say check this out to anyone looking for a unique, modern day mix of (hints of) Cheap Trick, Led Zep, Big Star, Thin Lizzy, Southern rock, Rainbow, Raspberries, Nuggetsy garage psych, and other goodness... like maybe if somehow Drunk Horse and The Makes Nice were melded into one band, bathed in sunshine???
It's only their 2nd full-length release and already Raleigh NC's Birds Of Avalon has become one of those bands that seems just so classic and capable that we find it hard to say anything other than that this is self evidently cool, please check it out if you like music! They're not easily pigeonholed you see. Early on when we heard their debut we could readily compare 'em to Thin Lizzy and Cheap Trick and the Allmans, but this album simply sounds like Birds Of Avalon. They're not as retro as before, or at least have incorporated an even wider range of influences, from '60s psychpop to '90s altrock... From track to track, we couldn't predict what was coming up next, so in some ways this the Birds Of Avalon at their experimental, eclectic, and warmly weird. That we've heard thus far anyway. There's plenty of melodic indie rock jangle goin' on, really pretty songs with mellow vocals, even a track ("Dadcage") that sounds like Frippertronics, all ambient guitar and gentle electronic gurgle. There's certainly some more rockin' stuff as well, but even that's got a sheen of laidback blissfulness to it. And power pop is still part of the Birds equation, but tripped out, with buzzing wooshing synths and stuff along with the (occasionally heavy, distorted) guitars.
Though we just said it's harder now to compare 'em to other bands, we like to try and do that anyway in our reviews, so at least will say that this is "recommended for fans of" these bands, and others: Swedish AQ faves Elope, Queens Of The Stone Age, The Cars, The Breeders, Sloan, 31Knots, and (thus) even early '70s Yes... plus all the others that Birds at one time or another has reminded us of.
A very satisfying listen. A bit different than before, but definitely like we said classic Birds Of Avalon no matter what. Experimenting, perhaps, but they know what they're doing.
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On a recent list, we reviewed the debut lp from Spacin', and over the last year or two, we raved endlessly about a band called Purling Hiss, even making on of those records our Record Of The Week. So what do those bands have in common? Well, they're both one man bands, and both of those man's play in THIS band as their 'day job'. In the Spacin' review we mentioned really needing to check out Birds Of Maya, and then BAM, this long out of print lp gets reissued on cd, and holy shit, how did we miss out on these guys. Forget all the weird psychedelic poppiness and classic rockisms of Purling Hiss and Spacin', Birds Of Maya is all sludgey crusty blown out low fidelity swaggery psychedelic space rock blooooz, equal parts Stooges, Groundhogs, Hawkwind, all of that stuff, but somehow, these guys make it sound even more mean and dirty and dangerous, locking into looped sounding churning riffage, wreathing their guitars in flanger and wah wah, the drum pounding away, but buried in the mix, the vocals yowled and yelped, but also buried in the mix.
The title track here is basically, a single riff, and single lyric repeated mantra like, the guitars chugging away, the drums a murky pounding pulse, super tribal and trancey, the sort of single riff psych rock mesmer that could easily have stretched out for another twenty minutes, but three is more than enough to get you totally mesmerized.
Then comes the twenty minute "Porch Dude" which definitely had us thinking of Liquor Ball or Monoshock, but a bit more bluesy, and a bit less damaged, but only a bit, the sound blown out and heavy as fuck, and then something weird happens at about three minutes in, the sound begins to mutate, and get all murky and muddy, almost as if the microphone was being lowered into water, the sound woozy and warped, and muted, which is how it remains for the remainder of the track, the band unfurling some of THEE most awesome shredding psych blues we've heard in ages. The 22 minute "Heavy On Sunday" offers up more of the same, but WAY more slowed down and swaggery, the sound like Les Rallizes Denudes, but the music full on seventies blues rock, some serious bar room boogie, but oozing with crumbling distortion, and once again plenty of shred, and like the song before it, with about seven minutes left, the song transforms again, and becomes a murky more lo-fi wild psych blowout, at which point we figure these guys just sort of cram recordings together to make these epics, but it works, and the two parts definitely fit, and the resulting weirdness only makes it that much more warped and psychedelic.
The cd reissue tacks on two bonus tracks, tucked away after about 90+ empty tracks, both of which find the band joined by a harmonica player for some serious psychedelic blooze, although the second bonus track starts off with a long stretch of weird buzzing lo-fi drones, before it explodes into one final burst of psych blues pound.
Old school death metal, featuring members of Alabama Thunderpussy, Baroness and of course drum god Dave Witte... lotsa raghhh raaghh arghh growlin' vocals and oh so clever song titles, like "The Old Lady Rots (But The Checks Keep Coming)" and others we won't mention 'cause they're so terrible.
Murky underwater jams from deep space, Birds You Once Knew is one of two Von Himmel related releases on this list (the other being Black Thread), and will not only appeal to fans of that band, but probably those of you digging the current crop of synth lords like Umberto, Zombi, and Gatekeeper. The main difference here is that BYOK doesn't really fit into the retro agenda of John Carpenter worshipping fan boys, instead operating on that distinct Von Himmel wavelength of melody and rhythm to take you into strange and majestic worlds. Unlike VH though, whose collage-like jams bring about all kinds of disorientation in the best of ways, BYOK lets things ride out without abrupt shifts and turns, and the results are perfect for zoning out into oblivion. Throughout the tape, synths wander about and give you the feeling of being transported to beautiful lo-fi worlds of pink skies, inflatable trees, and rainbow colored oceans. Or something. The drum machines are primitive and perfectly suited to get your ass moving into LaLa Land where you will dance your life away and never sleep again. It's a surprisingly fun affair with the greatest strength being its inherent tunefulness and the ease with which the friendly machines fool you into believing they beat with a human heart. Check it out!
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Many folks were disappointed when Cotton Casino decided to drop out of the Acid Mothers Temple. And it wasn't just lecherous psych rock nerds who would no longer be able to ogle the tiny chain smoking, perpetually scowling waif, stationed stoically behind her synthesizers. No, she also happened to contribute some of AMT's most appealing elements with her burbling blooping bleeping space rock synths and her angelic ethereal otherworldly vocals. This is only her second proper, non cd-r release, post AMT, and her first release as Birds, with her musical partner Per Gisele Galaen who had previously played in the groups Sloburn and Del. And damn if this isn't the lovliest AMT related record we've yet heard. As one might imagine, the focus here is Cotton Casino's voice, at once totally delicate and tentative, but at the same time dreamy and haunting. However, it's the surrounding sounds that really make this record special. The record opens acapella, with Casino's quavering vocals sounding like a timid girlish singer in some sort of creepy opera, which only gets creepier once the music comes in, hauntingly strummed guitars that blur into a shimmering minor key backdrop, while tiny electrical impulses whoosh to and fro in the background. After that the record drifts like an unmoored ship, down a dark stream through a dark and ominous forest, the sounds throughout moody and melancholy, with slow motion strings swooping in morose minor key arcs, Casino gurgling like a baby, her bandmate Galaen singing in a barely audible deadpan over swirls of space-y sound effects, the sounds of running water, delicate melodies playing on a heavily reverbed piano far in the distance, the buzz of steel strings ringing out like an electric sitar, dizzying synth melodies careening from speaker to speaker interrupted by wild squalls of full on ultra distorted Japanoise guitar skree, gorgeous folky acoustic guitars beneath Casino's hypnotic sing song vocals, extended stretches of warm droning rumbles, playful Moog melodies and more of that Casino bloopy space synth, sounding almost like Perrey And Kingsley, and finally the whole record finishes off with a six minute blast of full on wall of guitar meltdown, noisy and punishing, but at the same time completely hypnotic, like getting buried in warm wet sound, feeling it fill your ears and your eyes and your mouth, so all you can see or hear or taste is GUITAR, roiling and swirling and pulsing, slowly fading and drifting into space, leaving only a battered old piano, playing a simple melody, accompanied by Casino's barely there angelic purr.
Gorgeously packaged with original Pete Fowler artwork (Andee sports several Fowler tattoos in fact!), an image of a pink smoke breathing, wooden helmeted, long stripey armed, black bearded demon, surrounded by birds and squirrels and hairy horses, all rendered in blurred out 3-D on one of those cool three dimensional stereo lenticular cards. Wow!
Glenn Donaldson has been incredibly active lately in a number of San Francisco psychedelic / improv outfits (all with records out on the local Jewelled Antler cd-r label), including Thuja, the Knit Separates, the Blithe Sons, the Sky Green Leopards, Youth
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How 'bout that, we just noticed that this reissue of a rare, super-obscure 1975 improv jazz rock record got a 'review' in one of the latest issues of Vice magazine, of all places! But that kinda makes sense actually, since nudity, drugs, n' sex were seemingly all important elements of Birge/Gorge/Shirac's avant-hippy milieu. That is, judging by the movie on the DVD disc that comes in this deluxe two-disc package, which also features plenty of Vice-worthy fashion do's and don'ts from the freaky French scene back in the mid-seventies! The film in question, La Nuit Du Phoque, is an experimental student opus shot in 1974 by Jean-Jacques Birge and Bernard Mollerat. It's a surreal piece of work that's of course quite dated but certainly amusing and interesting. Political, humorous, psychedelic and very avant garde. Meanwhile Birge and two other cohorts were making crazy music as heard both on the soundtrack of La Nuit Du Phoque and the Defense De album, a truly cult ducument of abstract electronic jazz-prog-psych, one that made it onto the infamous Nurse With Wound list. It was recorded at a friend's dad's apartment who happened to be a free jazz producer and thus kept an 8-track tape recorder and a variety of interesting instruments from pipe organ (!) to cello to xylophone at home. Shiroc was the drummer, Birge played synth, sax, tapes, and more, and Gorge was on guitar, bass, the cello, etc. A friend supplied additional sax and another some electric piano. Sundry other electronics, percussion, ethnic instruments also made into the mix. A big sprawling free-for all, but not an unstructured mess. A lot of this is quite restrained and beautiful, droning and spacious. Apparently, these guys were in high school when they started doing stuff like this! Later they went on to found Un Drame Musical Instantane, an experimental music group still active today. The cd with Defense De contains not only the original LP but also four previously unissued tracks, while the DVD disc not only features the 41-minute La Nuit Du Phoque film but SIX MORE HOURS of previously unreleased Birge/Gorge/Shriac audio! And that's some of the best stuff on here. Wow.
Originally released in 1972, this album by the Uganda born Birigwa is one of the most unique and hard to categorize albums of afro-folk-jazz-blues-psych we've ever heard. Birigwa came to America to study at the New England Conservatory in the early '70s when he made this beautiful record, which falls somewhere between Tropicalia, pastoral South American psych, spiritual soul-jazz and eclectic blues, accented by his super versatile vocals which swing freely from deep to falsetto, playful to wonderfully weird (check out the last track!) to downright pretty. Backing Birigwa was a really strong band, his sound bolstered by the rich bass lines of Stark Reality member Phil Morrison and the perfect flute touches of Stan Strickland. Think of Caetano Veloso, Jorge Ben, Devendra Banhart or Milton Nascimento, with one foot in Africa, the other dipping its toes in sonic waters flowing from all sorts of great and unexpected places.
We'd be hard pressed to think of a more romantically beautiful and sexually provocative song, that doesn't fall prey to cloying sentiment or cheap thrills, than Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin's "Je T'Aime...Moi Non Plus". But apparently the Pope at the time didn't agree and universally condemned the song which only garnered more international attention for the song and the couple who sang it. When will the Catholic Church ever learn?
This 1969 eponymous record is another classic reissue in the Gainsbourg catalog from Light In The Attic which also features the amazing songs "69 Annee Erotique" and "Jane B.", a french pop re-working of Chopin's Prelude No.4 in E minor. Sensual, playfully lurid, groovy, and albeit a bit corny at times (especially where they timely delve into pre-war popular song nostalgia), it's definitely a document of a controversial couple in love in full view of the world, and they're playing up the show with as much verve and joie de vivre as they can muster, which for the coolest of cool couples is one hell of a lot! Both the cd and the lp include liner notes with lyrics in French and English, original drawings and a telling interview about the recording with Jane Birkin herself! The 180 gram lp comes with a bonus 7" and a never before seen Serge and Jane comic drawn by David Lasky.
After the amazing reissue of the 1969 Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg album, Light In The Attic gives us this reissue of Jane Birkin's proper solo debut from 1973, Di Doo Dah. Of course, Serge and his producer in crime, Jean-Claude Vannier make their presence felt, the latter especially in the arrangements that begin soft and low-key, but build with orchestral nuance and grace. Di Doo Dah has less of the mod-pop feel of the earlier record with Serge and is more lush and intimate, Birkin's non-native French singing is amazingly natural and fluid. Like Francoise Hardy's great La Question album we reviewed awhile back, Di Doo Dah is that perfect transitional record from youthful hipness to something more true and deeper lasting.
Reissue of the classic and highly controversial (at the time) record by Serge Gainsbourg and his wife, Jane Birkin. This CD contains some of Gainsbourg's (arguably) best works, from the sexually charged "Je T'aime Moi Non Plus" and "69 Annee Erotique" to playful classics ("Les Sucettes", "Elisa") to the beautifully orchestrated ("L'anamour", "Manon" & "Sous le Soleil Exactement").
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Nic Birmingham (one half of Dummy Run, whose other member may very well be in Stock, Hausen & Walkman) presents a whole lot of maniacal drill & bass that pushes much more drill than bass (it's all on the high-end register, folks) with whip snap hard disc scratching over digitally crispy lego beats.
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Drone damage industrial synth noise collaboration between Belgian avant noisemaker Cassis Cornuta and our old pals Olson and Connelly of Wolf Eyes, who together, whip up a gloriously noisy (and surprisingly listenable) slab of buzz and hiss and drone and drift. Wrapped in some of the most stunning packaging EVER, like most of the Ultra Eczema stuff. A massive fold out thick paper sleeve, the outside adorned with weird veiny, brainy skull-like monster heads, white on a greyish brown background, super creepy and icky, the inside, a full color landscape with a orange rock monster attacking a pregnant lady with a knife in the middle of a foresty swamp, while all around lurk goopy green melty creatures, with the tops of their heads removed and their bright orange brains leaking out. Eeeuw. And as if that weren't enough, this one sided disc, features an amazing etching on the the b-side, another creature, all bulging eyes and dripping brains.
So what's it sound like? A dense staticky synth rumble beneath clouds of whirring electronic glitch, laid atop massive slow moving slabs of low end, rife with lots of almost-melodies, peals of feedback and high pitched sinewave like tones. Everything wrapped in thick swirls of distortion and and amp damage crumble, occasionally interrupted by stretches of near ambient grind, blown out spaced out FX and creaking industrial crunch and clatter.
It's definitely noisy, and harsh at times, this basically is a 'noise' record after all, but it's surprisingly listenable, and downright pretty at times, droney and drifty as often as it is abrasive or brutal. Nice.
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The Birthday Party - Nick Cave's second band (but the first to really matter) - was a delirious ensemble, self-destructing from booze, heroin, sex, and hate. Along with Tracy Pew, Mick Harvey, Phill Calvert, and Roland S. Howard (a criminally underrated guitarist), Cave redirected the pelvic thrusts of Elvis to their most abject and most lewd. Live, the swamp blues guitars of Howard matches the sexual grind of Pew's bass, all the while Cave epitomized all the fears that England had of Australia - a genetically-mutated criminal raping Victorian England of all of her morals. Yeah, it's a really good recording and they do a Stooges cover with Jim Thirwell (Foetus) on sax.
The Birthday Party is, of course, that legendary ensemble fronted by a youthful Nick Cave with his full mane of hurricane shock hair and throat ripping vocals, method-acting his cautionary tales of booze, heroin, sex, and hate. Along with Tracy Pew, Mick Harvey, Phill Calvert, and Roland S. Howard (a criminally underrated guitarist), Cave redirected the pelvic thrusts of Elvis to their most abject and most lewd. Live, the swamp blues guitars of Howard matches the sexual grind of Pew's bass, all the while Cave epitomized all the fears that England had of Australia - a genetically-mutated criminal raping Victorian England of all of her morals. Yeah, it's a really good recording and they do a Stooges cover with Jim Thirwell (Foetus) on sax!
We've got pretty much an AQ-fave shoo-in here, this strange Japanese band combining crusty, doooooomy heaviness with wyrd folk ritual, like Corrupted (with whom they have some membership connection) combined with Ghost. This 40 minute album, featuring three tracks (a two minute into and then two much longer pieces), starts by building up the ancient, Asian folky ambience, adorned with mysterious Scooby Doo meets Ol' Dirty Bastard kung fu mumble, all of it very much darkly psychedelic, before it gets HEAVY at about 5 minutes into the 20+ minute track two, Birushanah suddenly kicking out the lurching, kinetic riffs/rhythms along with much more wretched, raspy vokills in the Khanate vein. Tricky tribalistic percussion conspires with sinuous, strangled guitars, stopping and starting and coming down hard, on the bizarre bulk of this creepy and crushing album. One whose eerie eccentricities, rooted in traditional Japanese music, we figure should appeal to a lot of you who dug that Quest For Blood release we made Record Of The Week recently!
You just might hear this on Wild 94.9, the Bay Area's dance station! Gentlemen, the transformation is complete. Bis are totally pumpin' out the dance tracks. Not a single glimmer of their past Scottish elfin indie pop selves. This album is even eons away from their Powerpuff Girls theme song. Sounding like they're shooting for a more mature audience, they've stripped away any of the sweet charm and energy of their past releases (particularly "Social Dancing" which successfully fused all of these key Bis elements). Alas, what we're left with is decent, if almost faceless, music. If you just wanna dance the night away in fluffy '80s discoland, this might be for you. Also features mixes by Adult., Tommie Sunshine and Ectomorph (Perhaps hoping to move a few more units, SpinArt Records threw the "electroclash" tag on the shrinkwrap. Argh!).
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Oh boy, what have Bis become? High energy dance pop...big emphasis on the dance. Fun, bouncy, '80s-gloss dancefloor hits in the making.
Currently a faculty member in the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, John Bischoff has been composing music with computers and electronics since the mid 70s, and has always focused his compositions towards malleable forms that best suit live performances. Within this context, Bischoff seeks to position the construction of sound far beyond the common perception of synthetic music as a mere simulation of the intrinsic sounds of traditional instruments. Instead, Bischoff qualifies his work as the realization of a "reflective intention," where he determines sonic structure not only through the predetermined elements which go into a piece, but also through the active process of listening to the music as it happens and responding accordingly. During the '70s when programming involved crude systems of binary code, Bischoff's vision of the possibilities for computer-based composition fused to performative agency seemed implausible; yet in hindsight, his artistic imperatives were incredibly prescient of contemporary tools such as the nearly omnipotent audio synthesis language Max/MSP, which has been at the core of Bischoff's recent work. An aptly named set of compositions, Aperture opens the possibility for multiple readings through a series of diverse techniques ranging from additive synthesis to FM synthesis to sampled-based processes. Each of the pieces on the album was recorded in real-time with no overdubs. Aperture introduces itself with clusters of samples that sprawl with the deliberate pacing of Morton Feldman's later period, yet Bischoff renders what might be recognizable citations of a piano or percussion as pointillist condensations of digitized pixels and precise plastic details. Over the course of the following pieces, Bischoff unleashes coarse streams of electrons which flange and pulse within the caustic firestorm of divergent timestretching, giving the impression that Bischoff is quite literally tearing the fabric of sound. Bischoff also offers a collaboration with Kenneth Atchley and complements the oversaturated physical noise of Atchley's water fountain sculptures with short digital articulations that ride on the top of Atchley's dense textures.
This is Bischoff's first recording in quite sometime, and has been well worth the wait!
Early on in the history of Sublime Frequencies, we can only imagine Alan Bishop (yup, of the Sun City Girls) giggling in his inimitably sinister way as he compiled the Radio series of Burroughsian leaps and jumps across the AM, FM, and shortwave bands recorded whilst he travelled through India, Sumatra, Morocco, Thailand, Palestine, and elsewhere. Bishop occasionally would let the dial stay on a particularly choice pop song, a weird commercial, or a flamboyant call signal mimicking the worst of the worst American conceits; but often these recordings were attention deficit disorder informed collages with lots of wild-dial twiddling and ear-fatiguing, media-saturated overload. For Radio Moderna, Bishop holds up the mirror back to the US with our own talk-radio demagoguery, legalistic religiosity, and crackpot tautologies. The first side of this tape is given the suitably blunt title "Complete Fucking Idiot Losers" with Bishop injecting those sutured textual collages with shards of shortwave noise, squalidly detuned FM-pop, and his own "go fuck yourself" commentary that's a less beatnik version of his infamously belligerent Uncle Jim persona. The flip "Quality Information" is far more difficult / Dada in the smattering of talk-radio decontextualized by the brain-jamming jump-cuts of Bishop bouncing between five or eight different radio stations. Of course, this damn thing is limited.
Those surviving Sun City Girls are always up to something. Travelling the world, probably. But also releasing stuff. Alan Bishop regularly wows us with amazing field recordings on his Sublime Frequencies label. In the case of "Sir" Richard Bishop we tend to expect his usual guitar improv ragadelica. But what about... a motion picture!?! That's what we have here, a dvd disc containing director SRB's half hour EPIC cinematic bad trip entitled God Damn Religion. It's a colorful, kaleidoscopic, sometimes stroboscopic collage of imagery drawn from the darker side of the human religious experience from around the world, ancient and modern, western and "primitive"... Pretty intense stuff. Frightening, frenzied. An overwhelming procession of sex and violence, hellish tortures and ribald pleasures. Demons and devils. Multilimbed Hindu gods and fallen Christian angels. Suffering sinners. Savage rites. All these gratuitous graphics crammed together like a flip book succession of details from Sun City Girls album covers. A segment (one of many) devoted to depictions of leering, long-tongued devils in the European tradition is followed by footage from a shrine of overgrown sculptural phalluses in Bangkok... Elsewhere SRB drops in scenes of witches and devils cavorting taken from the '20s silent film Haxan, as well as examples of "Buddhist torture paintings" he photographed in Southeast Asia.
We'd guess, rated R. Definitely not for kids, epileptics, or the impressionably Christian. The rest of us should find it quite fascinating, maybe even hypnotic. Maybe you'd even GET religion after being exposed to this, though presumably the idea is to make you sick of it. It's certainly a psychedelic visual experience, like a rapid fire glimpse into the Sun City Girls' graphic archives, and is excellently edited. The soundtrack music by SRB is of course an effective component too...
And in fact as a bonus, the first edition of this dvd comes with an extra disc, a cd version of the previously vinyl-only 2006 SRB album Elektronika Demonika, which is as scary as it sounds, four long tracks of claustrophobic ethno-industrial rhythmic, droney weirdness!! Pretty trippy, a funhouse flying saucer of a noisefest that itself would likely twist your mind even without the disturbing, sexually and demonically-charged visuals that it accompanies as a portion of the soundtrack to the God Damn Religion dvd...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The newest in the frustratingly limited Latitudes series. Former contributors have included the Grails, Shit & Shine, Will Whitmore, Ginnungagap and Ariel Pink (don't bother asking, they are all long gone). Here we have the Sun City Girls' Sir Richard Bishop, in his solo guitar Improvika mode. Very much in the spirit of the current American Primitive / neo Appalchia sound, exploring similar territory as Jack Rose, Stephen Basho-Jungans, Charlie Schmidt and of course John Fahey, but on these improvised tracks, Bishop injects a healthy dose of flamenco which is sort of surprising. Not that Bishop isn't well versed in various musics of the world, he most definitely is as any number of SCG records will attest to, but it still sounds a little surprising in this context, but the result is truly gorgeous. Moody and emotional, dark and dense, dreamy and lyrical. Just Bishop and a steel string guitar unfurling dense tangles of intricate fingerpicking, as well as slow contemplative melodies, all rich with Spanish flavor. Occasionally Bishop goes for an Eastern raga like vibe instead, and ends up sounding closer to UK guitarist James Blackshaw or Rose at his most drone-y. So so lovely indeed!
Comes packaged in a super intricate hand screened die cut fold over sleeve with a full color insert. The cover has a breathtaking silver foil stamped embossed frontpiece and each copy is hand stamped and numbered. Limited to 1000 copies worldwide, 500 of which made it to the United States, about 50 of which made it here. So you know what that means!
We've all been going nuts for Southern's Latitudes series, super limited releases from Ginnungagap, Shit And Shine, Ariel Pink, Grails, Paradise Island, and elsewhere on this list, new ones from Magik Markers and Circle! Well the fine folks at Southern have decided to press a few of those Latitudes discs on vinyl! The first of which is Fingering The Devil from the Sun City Girls' Sir Richard Bishop, in his solo guitar Improvika mode. Very much in the spirit of the current American Primitive / neo Appalachia sound, exploring similar territory as Jack Rose, Stephen Basho-Jungans, Charlie Schmidt and of course John Fahey, but on these improvised tracks, Bishop injects a healthy dose of flamenco which is sort of surprising. Not that Bishop isn't well versed in various musics of the world, he most definitely is as any number of SCG records will attest to, but it still sounds a little surprising in this context, but the result is truly gorgeous. Moody and emotional, dark and dense, dreamy and lyrical. Just Bishop and a steel string guitar unfurling dense tangles of intricate fingerpicking, as well as slow contemplative melodies, all rich with Spanish flavor. Occasionally Bishop goes for an Eastern raga like vibe instead, and ends up sounding closer to UK guitarist James Blackshaw or Rose at his most drone-y. So so lovely indeed!
Comes packaged in a cool diecut sleeve, a variation on the immediately recognizable Latitudes cd packaging, although this time, white on black instead of white on brown. Includes the same insert as the cd. Pressed on cool grey splatter vinyl. And of course, SUPER SUPER LIMITED!!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Now, but not for long, on (limited, expensive) vinyl!
Sir Richard Bishop, also known as Rick Bishop of the Sun City Girls, offers up Improvika, the second entry in Locust's Wooden Guitars series, after the compilation of that same name on which he also featured, alongside Tetuzi Akiyama, Jack Rose, and Steffen Basho-Junghans. It's also his second solo record -- his now out-of-print first one, Salvador Kali, was released a few years back on the Revenant, a label begun by the spiritual forefather of the Wooden Guitar concept, John Fahey (R.I.P.). So, as you might already guess, unaccompanied steel string acoustic guitar sketches in the Fahey-established "American Primitive" style are the haps here, with more than a few references to the wide variety of 'world musics' that the Sun City Girls like to celebrate and subvert. Bishop's playing is both impressive and evocative, and anyone caught up in the current craze for Faheyesque guitar solos (and why wouldn't you be?) ought to enjoy Sir Rick's sublime efforts here.
Originally self-released as a tour-only cd-r by the constantly wandering minstrel Sir Richard Bishop, former member of the always challenging Sun City Girls which disbanded after the death of drummer Charles Goucher. Both Richard and his brother Alan (also in the Sun City Girls) have an innate musicality that makes the songwriting process entirely second nature. As it seems so easy for both of them to spill forth song and (at least for Alan) verse, they've both fully immersed themselves in their own strategies to make music challenging and exciting at least for them. Where Bishop's brother Alan embodies the trickster persona from the Sun City Girls through his sneering Alvarius B persona and the scabrous Uncle Jim monologues, Richard takes up skill, craft, and technique culled from a lifetime of appropriating riffs from esoteric guitarists from the dusty corners of the world. In listening to the discoveries that Sublime Frequencies has made over the past decade or so (a label run in part by Alan Bishop), one can hear the influence from Saharan blues from Group Doueh, the Bakersfield country jigs from Buck Owen, the arabesque trills from Omar Khorshid, and the post-occidental folk-rock from Trinh Cong Son (surely, he'll be anthologized by Sublime Frequencies one of these days!). The further Richard Bishop has gotten from the SCG's gravitational pull, the prettier and more intricate his work has become. In listening to Intermezzo, we find ourselves hearing quite a lot of James Blackshaw or Alexander Turnquist in these exquisite acoustic and semi-acoustic guitar instrumentals. It's damn beautiful and at times heartbreakingly sad.
The Sun City Girls' Sir Richard Bishop, recorded live in 2005, tackling two prime Sun City Girls tracks, solo on steel string acoustic guitar, and the results are quite lovely. Gorgeous, stripped down acoustic versions of "Space Prophet Dogon" (maybe our favorite Sun City Girls song ever) and "Esoterica Of Abyssynia", both retain some of their Eastern flair, but sound more like some lost Basho or Fahey track. So cool.
Packaged in a plain brown cardstock jukebox style sleeve. Not sure how limited this is, probably very, we have about a dozen.
Sir Richard Bishop has been on a roll of late, making killer alchemical guitar compositions on a variety of labels such as Locust and Southern's Latitude series. Now perched for awhile on Drag City, Bishop has anointed us with probably his best and most diverse work yet. Featuring 11 concise compositions, Bishop's frame of reference varies wildly from flamenco to the early jazz stylings of Django Reinhardt. Most of the tracks have a much lighter tone compared to his last release "While My Guitar Violently Bleeds". But most notably on Polytheistic Fragments is the inclusion of a couple of amazingly beautiful piano compositions, such as the 8 minute centerpiece "Saraswati" that features languid piano cycles accompanied by droning tamboura that in a perfect world would be the only music we would ever need.
