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Limited to 1000 copies, here's the first installment in a series (of indeterminate number) dubbed Carnival Folklore Resurrection by the always confounding Sun City Girls. Six tracks, all new, recorded live in Seattle 1997. Apparently improvised, and of course not exactly easy listening. Sun City Girls fans know what they're getting into. Newcomers should instead start with all-time SCG classic "Torch of the Mystics".
A-side is the Sun City Girls uber-lo-fi punk rock freak out of the same name (a version of which appears also on "Libyan Dream" in the Carnival Folklore Series). The B-side is a field recording of someone getting their hair cut by a barber named "Carl". True story.
As promised, Locust Music has just re-issued the Sun City Girls' Dante's Disneyland Inferno. Long out of print, and never before released on vinyl, DDI was originally released in 1996 along side the fabulous 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda. Unlike 330,003 Crossdressers, Dante's Disneyland inferno is less likely to appear on anyone's "Sun City Girls album to own if you had to pick only one" choice. DDI is pretty much the Girls "spoken word" album (though not without its share of singing, of which there is much on here to boot) and as such is generally only good for one or two listens, kind of like God Speed You Black Emperor. Dominated primarily by the voice of Charley Gocher and accompanied by himself, the Bishop Bros., Scott Colburn + some special guests, the album isn't necessarily bad, it just doesn't lend itself to many repeat listens. The musical accompaniment to Gocher's sordid and seedy tales run the gamut of the SCG musical experience: off kilter beat jazz, improv. skronkery, world music tomfoolery and gloomy-folk freak out. And the poetics / songs themselves are two parts Grimm's Fairy Tales, one part Current 93 and 1.666 parts Ethel Merman on PCP. The end result of which is like a seriously disillusioned Tom Waits or a satanically possessed Violent Femmes, take your pick. As a bonus, you lucky vinyl buyers get an additional photo of the Girls and a comic adaptation of the song "The Brothers Unconnected" within this deluxe, double gatefold sleeve edition.
It's Christmastime for Sun City Girls fans it seems... well it's almost Xmas anyway for everybody as we write this, but what we mean is that some hard to find gems from the SCG's extensive and bizarre discography are finally finding their way back into circulation, with several long out of print LP titles getting cd re-release on Abduction in recent months. Sad as it is that the SCGs are no more (the trio's drummer Charles Goucher tragically a victim of cancer earlier this year) at least it will be a while before they run out of recordings to reissue, as this prolific band's back catalog of obscurities goes way back to the early '80s...
This particular item, a soundtrack (or is it? the film "was never completed" and perhaps was never begun, either), was originally released on limited edition vinyl in 1998. Based on this music though, we'd LOVE to see this film, if it did in fact exist. According to a "reliable" source (Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls, in the liner notes) the story goes that the SCGs were approached by a mysterious Japanese film director to provide the music to his film about a secret underground alien base in New Mexico. This alleged director turned out to be a member of the infamous Aum Shinrikyo cult, perpetrators of the sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995. Unfazed, the SCGs took the commission... but never heard from the Japanese man again. Hmm. Well we're happy that the SCGs followed through and produced this album (OR, made up that story, and produced this album).
On it, they blend delicate, melodic moments of overwrought cinematic beauty with the usual surreal SCG shenanigans. There's breathy, wordless vocals, industrial-strength noise, improv clatter, and cocktail-jazz flourishes... it's weird, it's spooky, it's sometimes quite lovely. Now, while we know the Sun City Girls could have easily done all this by themselves, they actually got some help from their friends, this album featuring contributions from violinist Eyvind Kang, clarinetist Jessie Miller, and last but not least, Japanese spazzprog drums/bass duo The Ruins (Tatsuya Yoshida and Ryuichi Masuda)!! Ends up sounding something like Mike Patton's Fantomas attempting to make music for a cattle mutilations movie, in the imagined style of a '70s Italian soundtrack, as if released on ESP-Disk (whew! stretched out that implausible string of doubtful comparisons didn't we...).
The second volume in the ongoing series of singles compilations from legendary outfit the Sun City Girls was one of the many duds that frustrate so much of the die-hard SCG fanbase. It was especially frustrating given that the first volume - You're Never Alone With A Cigarette (which as of spring 2013 is sadly out of print) - was so fucking good, mostly due to the fact that much of that material was made up of tracks that were left off the group's masterpiece, Torch Of The Mystics. At one time, TOTM was slated to be a double lp set with the Girls working towards fleshing out the whole album with a bunch of similar sounding tracks. So when the album dropped just as a single slab of wax, all of the remnants ended up finding their way onto various singles back in the early '90s. As Volume One did feature many of those leftovers, Volume Three thankfully completes the task, with two of those discarded Torch tracks culled from the Three Fake Female Orgasms 7" (released on Majora in 1991) as well as all of the cuts from the Eye Mohini and Borungku Si Derita singles (both released through Majora in 1992 and 1993 respectively, the latter featuring a different version of "Esoterica Of Abyssynia" from Torch Of The Mystics, just to make things all the more confusing). There's also a different version of "Kickin The Dragon" from the other SCG masterpiece 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, as well as a live version of another Torch classic, "The Flower".
The title track here in particular is a classic Sun City Girls jam, with Richard Bishop's desert-blues inspired fingerpicking seamlessly shifting from Arabic flourishes to Southeast Asian folk-pop and the more commonplace No Depression styled Americana, all with brother Alan plaintively sounding out syllabically a maudlin melody that may or may not be complete nonsense or some polyglot of languages dialed in by the Girls' esoteric antenna to all sorts of wild and wonderful songs from around the world. "Gum Arabic" is a terse re-interpretation of heavy Turkish psychedelia which would certainly foreshadow Sublime Frequencies eventual reissue collection of Erkin Koray's works. "Abydos Carousel Tapsel" has a bad-ass south-of-the-border vibe which shifts into an unhinged jubliant psych-folk in "Borungku Si Derita" which strangely sounds a lot like Comus! With so much of the Sun City Girls catalogue terminally out of print, getting a hold of anything from the band is a cause for celebration; but getting an album as great as this, even a collection, maybe especially a collection, is all the more reason to rejoice. And for those uninitiated into the demented psych-punk weirdness of SCG, this is a really great place to start.
Cassette archive reissue number four from Eclipse brings us two more long out of print Sun City Girls cassettes. Like the previous releases, these LPs do not definitively reproduce those old cassettes, but both include tracks previously unreleased and lack the inclusion of several tracks on those original cassettes. Folk Songs of the Rich and Evil comes out of the Girls' old stomping grounds of Phoenix, Arizona circa 1985. Through and through this one's an avant-punk-free-jazz-nightmare, demographically designed to fuck with the hopes and aspirations of the ethno rock loving crowd. Elliott likens Alan's fever pitched vocals to that of sleep talker Dion McGregor. The tracks on Exotica on $5 a Day come primarily from 1983 and 1985, also recorded in and around Arizona. For the tracks on side A brothers Alan and Richard drop their guitar and bass to join Charlie in a maniacal tribal faux-Native American drum and vocal jam. Ironically enough, the final -- bonus -- track on this side "Hopi Ceremonious" was recorded at a Big Mountain benefit in 1986. Side B is a set of droney improvised tunes, the likes of which must certainly be seen as sowing the seeds for a future No Neck Blues Band.
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Another in the Eclipse series of LP reissues of old Sun City Girls cassettes. If Byram was back from Java we'd have him explain all about it, as he's the big SCG expert 'round here, but we figure better to get this listed now, before it sells out, rather than wait for Byram to get back and shake off the jet lag. Plus how weird would it be for him to write about the Sun City Girls' faux-ethno shenannigans after having been in the real world locale from which they take so much inspiration? So, SCG fans, you need to know (perhaps) this: Fresh Kill Of A Cape Hunting Dog and Def In Italy (ugh) were both Cloaven cassette releases from 1987, although recorded from '83-'85 and on tour in '84, respectively. This luxurious gatefold vinyl edition is limited to a mere one thousand copies. Four sides of high weirdness you probably want real bad.
Already out print, this is the fifth in the Cloaven Cassette reissues from the Sun City Girls on vinyl. There were 23 of said cassettes which the Girls released themselves from 1987 to 1990, although some of the material dates back to their beginning in the early '80s. These two sets of recordings were recorded in 1986, most of which features live recordings of the 'Girls free improv / middle-eastern skronk dotted with some choice songs of their mangled psyche-punk including a live version of their single "Sev Asher." Like all of the previous Eclipse 2LP sets, not all of the original cassette has been rescued and preserved on vinyl, BUT there are some unreleased extras which do make their way onto these very nicely packaged sets. We only were able to get a handful, and when they're gone, they're gone...
We had long heard rumors that the Sun City Girls had been working on a cinematic album as something of a follow-up to Torch Of The Mystics and 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, two of our all-time favorite, classic albums from the Girls' idiosyncratic catalogue of punky psychedelia dissolved through Southeast Asian pop, free jazz, and Ennio Morricone soundtracks. But with the tragic death of drummer, poet, and polyglot savant Charles Goucher in 2007, it seemed that the Girls would end their career with the grand tease of an album of this sort never to be released. Fortunately, those recordings were not the stuff of urban legend or of unfounded fantasy, and the Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop has finally completed the album with the help of long time SCG cohort Scott Colburn! So here it is, the final SCGs album, and it's a worthy (and really quite accessible) capstone to their idiosyncratic discography.
Morricone has long been an influence and inspiration for the Sun City Girls, and especially Alan Bishop. In fact, he's been responsible for some of the best Morricone compilations issued over the years (i.e. Morricone 2000 and the Crime & Dissonance 2cd on Ipecac). As much as Bishop had been infatuated with Morricone, the homages to Morricone had been heavily disfigured and mutilated within the playfully murderous aesthetic of the Sun City Girls, where nothing is sacred and everything is fair game with the Girls' crosscultural appropriation. But for Funeral Mariachi, the Morricone riffs are situated in beguiling songs wholly devoid of the Sun City Girls' curmudgeonly fuck-you stances. In other words, Funeral Marachi is a damn good record. So good that it will probably invite a lot more people to investigate the wonderfully frustrating and woefully inaccessible back catalogue of the Sun City Girls.
Introspective, haunting, and at times beautiful, Funeral Mariachi opens with "Ben's Radio" where the Bishop brothers breakthrough a mid-tempo spy thriller number with a staccato duet of call and response avant-weirdness coupled with blurting atonal horns. Unmistakably Sun City Girls. In "Black Orchid", the group turns in the first of many Morricone references, where the Girls' are equally enamored by the incidental vocal melodies that worked throughout all of his scores. Here the Girls' offer a sad ballad for Richard Bishop's always stunning acoustic guitar and Alan's falsetto vocals bellowing his polyglot language. "Blue West," with its high-lonesome chorales, bad-ass guitar licks, and a mournful arrangements, could have been straight out of a John Ford movie. "Holy Ground" might as well be the Girls' answer to Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls to the Heart of the Sun" with Alan's caterwauling voice droning behind the diabolically chanted vocals, beautiful guitar leads, shadowy atmospherics, and weirdly playful calliope melodies. "Mineral Wells" and "El Solo" turn towards the more saccharine moments of the Morricone oeuvre with loungy piano, reverb whistled melodies, and actual female vocals (and not Alan mimicking a woman's voice). "Come Maddalena" is in fact a Morricone cover, from the 1971 Italian film Maddalena, perhaps known only for its soundtrack. Again, a rather moody atmosphere is set for plaintive, yet fuzzed out guitar melody. So fucking good!
The vinyl of Funeral Mariachi is undoubtedly limited, but a cd is scheduled for release later in October, we're told.
Eclipse has undertaken the ambitious yet noble task of re-releasing the entire Sun City Girls cassette recordings -- some of which date back to the band's pre-Placebo origins. This first re-issue (in a series of ten) includes the first two releases by the band, taken from their cassettes "God Is My Solar System" and "Superpower". Recorded between 1982 and 1983, these tracks show the Girls in all their youthful exuberance -- an unselfconscious & spontaneous collision of punk rock and free jazz-- and probably made when the members of bands like the No Neck Blues Band were just a twinkle in their mamas' eyes. Sadly for SCG completists, we aren't entirely sure whether these two slabs of wax actually contain all the tracks on first two cassettes. While none of us personally owns either, according to Scott Colburn's very complete discography -- http://www.gravelvoice.com/scg/scg.html -- there are quite a few tracks missing and some included which weren't even on the original cassettes. But before you poo poo this and the upcoming LP's as unworthy of your attention, know that you a) will only be able to find these tracks otherwise on crappy nth generation dubs and b) that these handsomely pressed gatefold double LPs are limited to 1000 copies. On top of that this album cover is attractively decorated with nice archival live photos of Sun City Girls demonstrating to all who stand before them just who the Gods, or Godesses, of costume rock are.
The 'Girls have finally gotten around to releasing volume 8 in their Carnival Folklore Ressurection series and is it worth the wait? Err... well, the dwindling fanbase around here say "nay!" But then again, we haven't been the staunchest supporters of this
"High Asia Lo-Pacific" comprise volumes 9 and 10 of the Sun City Girls' Carnival Folklore Resurrection series. High Asia, disc one, finds the Girls returning to their quasi-ethno folk which they seem to do so well. Using primarily stringed instruments --
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This record is fucked. Maybe you're thinking that "fucked" is one of the best compliments we can offer for a record. But seriously, this record is fucked-up. The Sun City Girls have long been known for the devilish personas which adopted liberally from the South East Asian pop and Bollywood scores. Slowly, erratic Beat poetry, bizarrely theatrical ideas, and uncomfortable experiments began to creep into their recordings. Jacks Creek was one of the records that had long been reviled as one of the Sun City Girl's biggest red flags for a serious lack of quality control. Loosely, a 'hillbilly' album, Jack's Creek begins with the Goucher and the Bishop Brothers muttering in badly rendered, redneck drawls about the terrible odor coming from an Indian burial mound somewhere nearby. For 10 minutes three men groans and whisper their fears, for one of the more convoluted extracts from the Sun City Girls catalogue. Eventually, a back-porch improv jam of warble and strum on harmonica, banjo, and voice brings this track to a conclusion, leaving more questions than answers. The hobo freak-folk of Jacks Creek with more hoots, false starts, and faux-drunk dialogue than actual songs, would certainly turn off anybody looking for an entire album of dramatic psych-punk ecstasy a la Torch Of The Mystics (although a few meandering gems like "Fact The Business" work their way into Jacks Creek). Like we said, this record is fucked.
Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls has been the curator of many of the finest Ennio Morricone collections, including the brilliant compilation on Ipecac Crime & Dissonance, despite the John Zorn written liner notes that seemed to suggest that Mike Patton had done the compiling. Needless to say, it makes a lot of sense for the Sun City Girls to find their way into the realm of the soundtrack, given Alan Bishop's love of Morricone; and Juggernaut is one of those Sun City Girls soundtracks. While this soundtrack was originally released on vinyl through Abduction back in 1994, the corresponding film by Mark Roman Bodnar and Kyrill Kazemirovitch Protsenko had never been officially released. That said, it did make an appearance at an Italian film festival in 1997; so, it probably is an actual film, and not some fiction propagated as a strange in-joke by the Sun City Girls. But then again...
Anyway, Juggernaut is a pretty good Sun City Girls album. The band had always been a difficult proposition, as they had thrown every idea (from the great notions of smashing Southeast Asian pop melodies with SoCal skate punk energy to the better-in-theory modes of junkyard gamelan via free jazz) at the audience and let them sort out the mess. Juggernaut follows suit, as an entirely instrumental album with the highlights giving nods to the classic SCG album Torch of the Mystics through lysergic guitar solos splattered across acid-punk jams that could easily ground the work of early Flaming Lips or Thinking Fellers, if those bands were way more fucked up. The semi-focused, stoned ritualism that makes up the rest of the album could have had some atmospheric purpose in the original film although they're not out of character for any given Sun City Girls album.
Volume 7 in the Carnival Folklore Resurrection series, and all four of Aquarius' Sun City Girls heads give it the thumbs up. According to the liner notes the Sun City Girls originally made 50 cassettes of "Libyan Dream" and dropped them off in cassette
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We were thinking, yay, Singles Volume 2! Singles Volume 1, entitled You're Never Alone With A Cigarette, was soooo good (see our review elsewhere on the site, sadly though it's out of print now).
But... er... well... not yay quite so much. This one is kinda hard to take, though certain diehard SCG fans will doubtless disagree. It's the skits side of their ourvre represented here, rather than the music.
Maybe go for the Master Musicians Of Bukkake's Totem One or Totem Two, instead, if you haven't already.
So the story goes that a young Italian director named Antonio Pomola got in touch with the Sun City Girls in 1993 to score a film about a giant pre-historic flying reptile terrorizing a 19th Century Native American tribe somewhere in the Midwest. According to the Girls, the film was never completed; and the soundtrack is the only document from the film's creative genesis. There doesn't appear to be any further information about the career or even existence to this Pomola character, beyond the fact that the Sun City Girls composed this soundtrack of fragmented interludes, raga instrumentals, and weirdo atmospherics. Needless to say, the Girls self-released this soundtrack in 1994 on vinyl; only to have it disappear from circulation in quick fashion.
Jump a dozen years into the future, and the soundtrack is available again at last with a cd pressing. Composed immediately after their Juggernaut soundtrack (reviewed elsewhere on this list), the Sun City Girls offered a series of edited fragments, which mostly touch on a psychedelic ritualism which foreshadows the Finnish free-folk splatter of Avarus, Kemialliset Ystavat, and Kuupuu. Faux-indian raga blues drifts into lumbering plods for plenty of chicken scratch guitar noodles, free-jazz drum stumblings, and glossalaic vocals. At times, the Bishop brothers and Charlie Gocher tease us with a glimpse of their mutant songwriting talents; but more often than not, it's sinister atmospheres for gongs, Tibetan horns, and amorphous guitar pluckery.
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After an almost three year hiatus (Sublime Frequencies seems to have been garnering the Girls' attention and finances these days) the Sun City Girls have racheted up the Carnival Folklore Resurrection project with two new titles, both of them live performances by the trio on the radio. This first set, CFR volumes 11 & 12, was recorded in November of 2002 on Brian Turner's radio show on WFMU in New Jersey and was actually originally released a year or so ago as a super limited edition available only through the group's website. Both sets are quite similar in execution, spanning the gamut of SCG's musical tendencies. Either of these performances could be seen as a great introduction to the group or, equally, one for serious fans only. It's all here: overseas shortwave and field recordings, Uncle Jim rants, skronky improv madness, pretty instrumental interludes, re-engineered soundtrack themes and bizarre mixes. If there's a noticeable difference in the balance of material on the two releases we'd say that Radio One & Two has more Uncle Jim ranting and field recording mixing, while 98.6 Is Death has more actual live rocking, jamming and skronking in the studio.
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How time flies... We're now on volume 5 in the Girls' monthly "Carnival Folklore Ressurection" series. Seven more to go. This one was recorded on March 18th of this year in -- surprize, surprize -- Seattle, Washington. The disk opens with a mock blues piece with curmudgeonly vocals by Mr Gocher, and then proceeds into a rather nice 10 minute, organ led instrumental dirge rock jam. After a track of more Gocher-led rambling (this time more akin to the tracks on "Dante's Disneyland Inferno") the rest of the show is occupied by guitar, bass and drum improv madness. Not exactly crucial, but who is to understand what is it is that Sun City Girls fans really want...
Ah the Sun City Girls. Ever perplexing and unpredictable... yet reliably weird. It's nice to know there's always the Sun City Girls. It's kinda that "there'll always be an England" feeling. But different. Very different. Anyway, and now we're up to number fourteen in the SCG's "Carnival Folklore Resurrection" series. Static From The Outside Set recorded (or should we say compiled?) for a BBC radio program, On The Wire Lancashire, in the summer of 2005. There's 29 diverse tracks here, many of them collaged tracks-within-tracks edited to simulate the spinning of the radio dial. Highlights? Well there's a lot of almost Jewelled Antlerish tinkering and droning, we liked those cuts quite a bit. The SCGs can do the psychedelic drone folk thing quite well (and they also play on our heartstrings by doing a very faithful cover of "Gently Johnny" from The Wicker Man soundtrack!).
But there's more: fake-jazz ("Tea Boy Attitude", "Django-ized"), Beeheartian skronk ("Iced-Off Broccoli"), interminable talk radio parody ("Sacrifice in the USA"), blues, a limerick, a Brian Wilson song, all sorts of jibber jabber and non sequitur interludes, like the track "Elvis and Machinery" wherein the Colonel tells Elvis, "stay away from that wheelbarrow, you don't know nothin about machinery". You'll go "huh?" but then the Girls will spin that dial and you'll be dealing with something else already. So it's something of a grab bag, but one we sure didn't mind groping around in.
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Six discs into the Sun City Girls' rather indulgent "Carnival Folklore Resurrection" series and even the most fannish of fans could be forgiven for starting not to care. So, in accordance with their contrary ways, leave it to the SCGs to spring a surprise: this one is probably the best yet in the series, an actual collection of pseudo ethnic psychedelic "pop" songs mixed with mysterious field recordings, both providing much evocative, "exotic" ambience. So, if the messy spazzy skronk of the live stuff that comprises a lot of the first five discs in the CFR series turned you off, you should give 'em another chance with this one.
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Volume three in the "Carnival Folklore Ressurection" series. This one was taken from a live show, once again in Seattle, from September 13, 1997. Jim and Byram both rate this one somewhere in between the second and the first (Andee would just as soon see them stop altogether) -- a bit of their rock fuckery and a bit of their jazzy improvery. Our man on the inside, John at Revolver, says that there are twelve of these due for release (one a month.) I suppose that there are people out there that will need all twelve, but I just wish they would re-issue all their cassettes on cd -- remastered or not -- or get the rights to re-issue their old Placebo releases?
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Second volume in SCG's "Carnival Folklore Resurrection" series, The Dreamy Draw is a vast improvement over the first. Similar to Vol. 1, it's a semi-improvised live performance (this time Seattle in May of 1998), but this is executed with a greater degree of savvy, on the level that one would expect from a group as seasoned as the Sun City Girls (rather than the pedestrian stoned-in-college basement "jam session" of volume one.) The performances here are soaked with meandering piano playing pseudo-East Asian pentatonic ditties along with the various parts and pieces of gamelan that the Girls have picked up in their travels.
So, we already put this on our special all-Torch Of The Mystics in-between list last week, because we just couldn't wait to list it, and here it is again, a no-shit, straight to the top Record Of The Week. An absolute must-buy, a record that DESPERATELY needed to be reissued (along with almost all 10,000 other Sun City Girls records, certain crazy people would argue). So here it is on both cd and vinyl! And here's the expanded, in-depth review we promised...
So what to say about this fuckin' record? Originally recorded in 1988 during a time when the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher had been making much more overtly subversive work. 1987's Horse Cock Phepner (an album that could use this reissue treatment, by the way) experimented with drug-addled spoken word, hypno-percussive vulgarity-ridden tributes to Nancy Reagan, and Urinals-esque minimalist noise-punk. This makes sense given the Bishop brothers' musical upbringing in the early '80s Arizona punk and hardcore world. But the recordings sessions that would become Torch of the Mystics had such a different result. Like we mentioned last week, due in large part to the success of labels like Bishop's Sublime Frequencies, in making the SCG's third world influences more familiar to us, this record does get the "most accessible" label, maybe even more than it seemed originally. It's still fantastically out-there, but yeah, compared to other Sun City Girls output before and after this record, this is downright radio friendly.
It's hard to talk about records that are this fantastic, we don't really have words that can do it justice. Right from the first snare crack of opener "Blue Mamba", it's impossible not to get sucked into another world. The first notes of the bass line immediately floor us, then the whole band comes in, with droll vocals not even really saying coherent words over some sort of desert-scorched melody, part Sahara and part Sonoran. "Tarmac 23" is up next, a total outsider improvised psych freak-out, the guitar line an off-kilter loop, Gocher's drumming managing to keep the whole thing together. "Esoterica Of Abyssynia" and "Space Prophet Dogon" are, of course, the masterpieces of this record. "Esoterica" has a twisting and looping guitar line like something John Fahey would play if he studied under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar, and also owned a distortion pedal. "Space Prophet Dogon" is one of those instances that makes us all go full Andee and say "perhaps THEE greatest song EVER!" Seriously, without trying to sound too over-the-top hyperbolic, "Space Prophet Dogon" (later covered by the Grails) is one of those songs that should be played at funerals. A spiritual, otherworldly lick with its roots somewhere in Egypt or maybe a Moroccan hash cafe, but in true Sun City Girls fashion, twisted and warped to their liking. The longest song on the record (a scant 7 minutes) with the last 2 and a half completely improvised, and perhaps the most beautiful part, a bleary-eyed psych trip. This record would be totally worth it if it just played this song 11 times, trust us. But there's so much more! "Cafe Batik", "The Flower", "Papa Legba", and "Burial In The Sky" all follow in the footsteps of "Tarmac 23", improvised, warped, outsider-jazz-raga-middle eastern psych-folk numbers with Gocher's percussive mastery and Alan Bishop's sung/shouted vocals taking front row. "The Shining Path" could be a lost track off a Morricone soundtrack, a whistle-and-acoustic guitar number with that catchy and haunting melody line sung over it. "Radar 1941" is like the Ventures on thorazine, a slowed down, chewed up and spit-out attempt at surfy skronk. Like a foreshadowing of his solo career, "The Vinegar Stroke" is a classic Sir Richard Bishop piece, a masterfully played acoustic guitar track that feels like it's pulling inspiration from 5 different musical styles at once.
In short, (ha!) Torch Of The Mystics is an album that is from both everywhere and nowhere. It constantly plays with things you've maybe heard, but can't quite recall. It's at once high and low brow, mimicking some criminally underheard guitarist in the Sahal, or a drunkard trying to recite the Rigveda from memory. The babbling of Charles and Alan are in either some unknown foreign language or complete gibberish, perhaps playing with some sort of postmodern idea of Western cultural appropriation and our often naive and hamfisted takes on "world" music, or maybe they were just high and fucking around.
An utter masterpiece, a no-brainer must-have piece of every music collection.
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Reissued once again on cd, Torch... is most often referred to as the best SCG album; a good place to start.
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Finally a cd reissue of this excellent SCG improv-splatter elpee.
In recent months, we've seen several interestin' Sun City Girls reissues come out on cd via the Abduction label, like such previously vinyl-only rarities as the (supposed) soundtrack recordings to Piasa The Devourer Of Men, Dulce, and Juggernaut. Along with the shaggy dog hillbilly joke that is Jacks Creek. So fans of the now sadly defunct Sun City Girls, that cultish, psych-punk, faux-ethnic, WTF? trio, have had some welcome listening of late. However, this new disc, a collection (volume one!) of Sun City Girls singles, has us the most excited yet. That's cause these nine tracks, mostly released as singles on the Majora label back in the day, were actually all recorded during the same sessions that resulted in the acclaimed 1989 SCG album Torch Of The Mystics. That album, now out of print, is almost universally regarded as the band's best, and most popular. We'd agree, it's definitely the unanimous fave here at AQ (well, along with the equally long gone 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda). Too bad Torch Of The Mystics is out of print!! But of course that makes these tracks, cousins to those on Torch, all the more covetable!
Apparently, originally Torch was meant to be a double LP, and most of these tracks were instrumentals that would have been sequenced in amongst the songs that appeared on the final version of Torch. Plans for a double LP were eventually scrapped, and much of the extra material was then released by Majora on the You're Never Alone With A Cigarette 7" and Three Fake Female Orgasms 2x7". However, three of the tracks here are previously unreleased studio recordings, and another track, "The Fine-Tuned Machines Of Lemuria", is restored to its full 12 minute length for the first time (having been edited down for 7" release).
On of the reasons we (and everybody) likes Torch so much is that the songs, sounding much like some sort of alien, Southeast Asian surf rock, were unhindered by the unhinged eccentric excesses that make so many other, more confusional SCG recordings something of an acquired taste. Their unique take on "world music" was at its most accessible on Torch, with some of their most memorable, melodic moments and evocative atmospheres. You're Never Alone..., while not quite Torch part II, is certainly in that ballpark, with the ringing, exotic electric guitar skree of Richard Bishop taking center stage on much of this, ably supported by the drums and percussion of Charles Gocher and the bass playing of Alan Bishop (with sundry other, often ethnic, instrumentation from all). There's glorious folky riffing and moody improvs and plenty of prime SCG wonderful weirdness. Definitely an essential disc for all SCG fans!!
Longtime aQ pal Chris Johanson (rad artist and Awesome Vistas label head) dropped by the store the other day with just a handful of this special edition release by his current band Sun Foot. As part of an ongoing series called Old News, where the label commissioned bands to make records based on current issues in the news (or rather, not in the news enough!) that are important to them, Sun Foot use their installment to highlight breakdowns in the justice system that inevitably send innocent people to death and for juveniles to be increasingly tried as adults, using the recent execution of Troy Davis as its central focus. Sun Foot, who also count among its members Brian Mumford from the tweaked Americana project, Dragging An Ox Through Water, bring a bluesy shambling dirge of grief and resilience through four tracks that are as ramshackle as they are urgent. Comes with three printed inserts of news clippings and information about the project. These are limited to 300 of which we have 5 and probably cannot get more so act fast if you want one.
Craziness courtesy Mssrs. Yoshida (Ruins) and Yamamoto (Boredoms, Omoide Hatoba). 29 tracks with titles like "Rush In Outer Space" and "Dream, Scum, True!!".
After all these years, Mark Kozelek's music still fills us with chills and goosebumps like no one else can. His melancholic voice and restrained arrangements come together for songs that sink so deep into our veins and lead us into cloudy and dazed daydreams. Admiral Fell Promises is a new set of songs written by Kozelek (he was on a big covers kick for a while) and they rank right at the top of anything he has created. The formula is not all that different from past Sun Kil Moon releases but there is something in the stark immediacy of the songs that is pulling us in so deep to this carefully crafted album. Maybe it's all the years he's spent in San Francisco but the record is just so perfect for those fog filled grey days that hit us all throughout the year and make us forget what day/month/year it is. These songs are so perfect for that dazed and dislocating sensation, filled with such a bleak romanticism. If he didn't have such a tasteful sense of subtly he could easily wow a crowd with impeccable almost flamenco/Spanish sounding guitar playing. Kozelek is one of those people who has never rested on his laurels. After Red House Painters it would have been easy for him to just allow that to be his lasting legacy, but over the years under his own name and the Sun Kil Moon moniker he continues to create a body of work that will stand the test of time. A must have for Kozelek fans and if you have checked out on his releases for a while this would be a great time to check back in!
From the first few chords and softly warbled vocals of April's 10 minute opening track, "Lost Verses," it's clear that we are in familiar territory with Mark Kozelek's latest release under the Sun Kil Moon moniker -- his first collection of new songs since 2003's Ghosts Of The Great Highway; his incredibly distinctive, molasses-slow blend of roots, indie rock, doom and gloom folk, Neil Young-tinged guitar sprawl, and traditional American songsmithery is in full effect here. Kozelek has made a career out of continually refining a very particular and immediately recognizable aesthetic. It's a sound that is at once both sprawling and intimate, expansive and hushed, confident and reserved. April is marked with the same sense of haunted yearning and loneliness that has characterized all of his best work. In fact, this may be one of the finest collections of songs he's produced to date. It's easy to get lost in this record, as the delicate interplay between words and melody weave their way around one another and reveal a stark beauty that only Kozalek is able to produce.
This 2cd set includes a bonus disc with alternate versions of 4 songs from the album lovingly packaged in a digipak adorned with ethereal b&w photography that will be as familiar to fans as the sound of Kozalek's voice. Simply gorgeous.
Attention all Mark Kozelek and Red House Painters fans gather 'round! Here's something new for you from the gent himself! Not surprisingly his new band sounds very much in the same vein as his assorted past work. Heck, his stellar bandmates include Red House Painters' Anthony Koutsos, American Music Club's Tim Mooney and Geoff Stanfield (ex-Black Lab). Each song is steeped in Kozelek's usual yearning melancholia and lyrical eloquence, all warmed by ample reverb. The highlight is the expansive, haunting 14 minute long "Duk Koo Kim", although "Carry Me Ohio" and "Last Tide" aren't far behind. As well, they fire things up a bit on the comparatively rockin' "Lily And Parrots". Sure to please fans new and old.
Hurrah! This marvelous Sun Kil Moon album has been reissued by Mark Kozelek's own label Caldo Verde. Along with the original album comes a whole extra disc of a half dozen bonus tracks including an acoustic rendition of "Salvador Sanchez", two versions of "Somewhere" and a radio recording of "Gentle Moon".
Here's what we said about the 2003 release:
Attention all Mark Kozelek and Red House Painters fans gather 'round! Here's something new for you from the gent himself! Not surprisingly his new band sounds very much in the same vein as his assorted past work. Heck, his stellar bandmates include Red House Painters' Anthony Koutsos, American Music Club's Tim Mooney and Geoff Stanfield (ex-Black Lab). Each song is steeped in Kozelek's usual yearning melancholia and lyrical eloquence, all warmed by ample reverb. The highlight is the expansive, haunting 14 minute long "Duk Koo Kim", although "Carry Me Ohio" and "Last Tide" aren't far behind. As well, they fire things up a bit on the comparatively rockin' "Lily And Parrots". Sure to please fans new and old.
Such a remarkable songwriter who clearly appreciates other remarkable songwriters, Mark Kozelek seems to really loves covering other folks' music! You might recall his awesome cavalcade of AC/DC songs (found on three of his solo cds -- Rock & Roll Singer, What's Next To The Moon and the out-of-print White Christmas), not to mention a handful of John Denver, Kiss and Simon & Garfunkel tunes too. Well, in his post-Red House Painters band Sun Kil Moon he's strangely chosen to follow-up their acclaimed 2003 debut album Ghosts Of The Highway with a sophomore effort which is comprised completely of Modest Mouse covers. S'pose it was a pretty fun album to record considering the caliber of Isaac Brock's songs (not to mention a pretty shrewd business move on his part considering the current popularity of Brock & Co). Very odd, but it works! Kozelek fully inhabits Tiny Cities, making the songs warmly his own.
Probably all anyone will really need to know about Sun Of The Blind is that it is the solo project of Zhaaral from mighty Swiss black metal spacemen Darkspace, and in fact that's all we really needed to know, when we first heard about this, we knew it had to be good, how could it not be? And thankfully our faith in this grim Swiss black warrior was not misplaced.
Don't be expecting any blazing buzzing black space metal a la Darkspace, or even wintery black frost a la Paysage D'Hiver, although you do get a little of each, there are similarities, in the use of ambience, of mood, and texture, but Sun Of The Blind is way more melodic, poppy even, the sound washed out and woozy, melancholy yet epic. The songs tend toward the midtempo, with some of the riffs and melodies, reminding us of a more amped up Jesu or Nadja, the same sort of lysergic shoegaze quality, clouds of interwoven melodies, gorgeous harmonies, all over a churning, mantric, hypnotic black groove.
Much of the record is spent drifting and droning, single notes and gently strummed chords suspended between sheets of blackened shimmer, while elsewhere, strange electronics and crumbling loops underpin woozy sun dappled minor key melodies, building to gauzy dreamlike dirges, or exploding into dense flurries of black crush.
Skullreader is warm and enveloping, a massive roiling melodic buzzscape that is almost more hypnotic than it is heavy, an utterly gorgeous collection of blown out black beauty that almost sounds like some impossible Darkspace / Katatonia hybrid.
Easily one of our new favorite black metal records for sure, and essential for any Paysage / Darkspace obsessives...
This is the silliest sounding (and looking) cd we've gotten in a long time. So much so that we spontaneously blurted out new words to describe it... like "twinkee booobles shplicka poing-poing"! Dunno quite what that means -- won't find it in a dictionary -- but it sure fits this Belgian fellow Laurent Baudoux's music. To boot, all the lyrics are befuddlingly sung in Japanese by MC Illreme! Yes, some folks might describe the tracks as being old video-gamey sounding, but there's more loopy-bloopy layers and jagged rhythmic outcrops going on that Super Mario would prolly have a hard time negotiating... but not us! Fans of Atom Heart (any one of his numerous personas) and Aavikko might experience particular breathless glee in Orchestre Philharmonok. More fun than a barrel of balloon-a-gram toting monkeys.
We thought that the Dutch label Calibre had taken over the task of reissuing ESP-Disk classics, but for some reason they've licensed some of the titles to the Italian label Get Back, who like to release cds in little cardboard lp-styled sleeves. Anyway, either way, we're glad that this album is back in the racks. One of our favorite of the many Sun Ra documents, this recording dates from December 1973, showcasing Sun Ra's amazing early '70s synth-madness and the Arkestra's jazz-funk spaced-out-chants (like the version found here of the classic "Space Is The Place"). The turbulent cosmic journey of the Comet Kohutek is rendered in sound with Sun Ra's arsenal of keyboard electronics, and celebrated with the space-positive grooves of the rest of the band. Great stuff!
Several ESP-Disc classics have been re-pressed onto 180-gram vinyl by some nice Italians, whoo-ooo! A great early 70's Sun Ra cosmic keyboard/spacefunk concert, *the* essential Patty Waters avant-jazz-vocal platter (with "Black Is the Color Of My True Loves Hair"), a freaky underground scene sound collage document (with the likes of the VU and Allen Ginsberg), and an all-star free jazz soundtrack from '65 with Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Roswell Rudd, John Tchicai, Gary Peacock, and Sunny Murray! And, as the now-deleted cd reissues of these are becoming harder and harder to come by, just in time.
