digital primitivism may be lost to media hype and packaged tours, but the hardcore technofreaks will just lose themselves in the porous Third World landscape. After all, the full moon follows you everywhere you go.
1994
CAMEO DEMONS
The Sun City Girls
Alan and Rick Bishop are two halfbreed desert rats on the cusp of middle age who live in Seattle and make music, when they do, in a trio called Sun City Girls. Rick’s on guitar, Alan plays bass and sings, but the brothers play with lots of other things as well: double-reed pipes, gamelan, puppets, language, demons, audience expectations, states of consciousness. The third Girl is named Charlie Gocher, and he’s a scraggy Californian transplant the Bishop boys first met in the openmic scene in Phoenix over twenty years ago. Gocher plays drums—open, slippery, consternating drums—and he writes and occasionally lets loose some mighty ornery post-Beat rants.
The Bishop brothers are addicted to third world travel, and have been so since they first hit the Moroccan hinterlands in 1984. Gocher joined a Bishop expedition only once, during a 1989 trip through Indonesia. One night in Yogyakarta, a seaside city on the coast of Java, the trio stumbled into an itinerant Kuda Kepang group, a family troupe that entertained the crowds with a ferocious, gamelan-fueled mixture of magic tricks, hobby-horse theater, and glass-eating, fire-breathing performance trance. Whenever tourists stopped, the leader cracked a bullwhip next to their heads and scared them off.
The Girls, characteristically, held their ground. Years before, when they first hit the stage with their peculiar mix of sardonic rock, outsider improv, and hippie mysteriosa, they could only get gigs at punk shows, and the crowds responded to their baffling sets and bizarre costumes with anger and violence. The band came to aggressively taunt these people, dishing out verbal abuse, sarcastic musical moves, and the occasional cup of urine. Guys like that can certainly deal with a stingless lash from a Javanese heavy. They could even see where the dude was coming from.
So every night the three young men would wait for what they called “the call of the wild”: the distant madcap clang-clang-clang-clang that would lead them through the crowded city to the Kuda Kepang crew. After two weeks of this, they had almost become part of the family, with Charlie banging out percussion as Alan fed lightbulbs to the kids, their mouths a repulsive mass of lacerations and kerosene burns. You could say a sort of transmission occurred. Alan describes it simply as “the best show ever.”
A month and half later, the Girls were on a boat, heading through the Strait of Malacca on their way to the Sumatran city of Medan. With nothing better to do, the trio asked the boat’s lounge act to hand over their electric instruments for a set. The band ripped through what one might call a “typical” Sun City Girls set: “House of the Rising Sun,”“Esta Susan En Casa?” from Horse Cock Phepner , and a sun-baked skronkjam peppered with abrupt stops and starts. The Indonesian audience clapped at the beginning of every song, and then clapped again at the end. Like nearly all Girls performances, this one was recorded, and Rick reports that at one point on the tape you can hear a patron lean over to his companion and proclaim: “Ah, this is American jazz!”
Purists might have trouble with this description, although SCG are more than capable of pounding out Duke Ellington and Paul Bley tunes. But if jazz means a deep commitment to improvisation, and if improvisation means having the guts to force the hand of chance, then Sun City Girls are most certainly jazz.
They are most certainly not purists. Sun City Girls traffic with bizarre miscegenations, self-indulgent trash, and hardcore mystic exotica. Their sometimes garish album covers attack the eye with devils, yonis, sacred transvestites, and nubile native jailbait. Lyrics, song, and album
1994
CAMEO DEMONS
The Sun City Girls
Alan and Rick Bishop are two halfbreed desert rats on the cusp of middle age who live in Seattle and make music, when they do, in a trio called Sun City Girls. Rick’s on guitar, Alan plays bass and sings, but the brothers play with lots of other things as well: double-reed pipes, gamelan, puppets, language, demons, audience expectations, states of consciousness. The third Girl is named Charlie Gocher, and he’s a scraggy Californian transplant the Bishop boys first met in the openmic scene in Phoenix over twenty years ago. Gocher plays drums—open, slippery, consternating drums—and he writes and occasionally lets loose some mighty ornery post-Beat rants.
The Bishop brothers are addicted to third world travel, and have been so since they first hit the Moroccan hinterlands in 1984. Gocher joined a Bishop expedition only once, during a 1989 trip through Indonesia. One night in Yogyakarta, a seaside city on the coast of Java, the trio stumbled into an itinerant Kuda Kepang group, a family troupe that entertained the crowds with a ferocious, gamelan-fueled mixture of magic tricks, hobby-horse theater, and glass-eating, fire-breathing performance trance. Whenever tourists stopped, the leader cracked a bullwhip next to their heads and scared them off.
The Girls, characteristically, held their ground. Years before, when they first hit the stage with their peculiar mix of sardonic rock, outsider improv, and hippie mysteriosa, they could only get gigs at punk shows, and the crowds responded to their baffling sets and bizarre costumes with anger and violence. The band came to aggressively taunt these people, dishing out verbal abuse, sarcastic musical moves, and the occasional cup of urine. Guys like that can certainly deal with a stingless lash from a Javanese heavy. They could even see where the dude was coming from.
So every night the three young men would wait for what they called “the call of the wild”: the distant madcap clang-clang-clang-clang that would lead them through the crowded city to the Kuda Kepang crew. After two weeks of this, they had almost become part of the family, with Charlie banging out percussion as Alan fed lightbulbs to the kids, their mouths a repulsive mass of lacerations and kerosene burns. You could say a sort of transmission occurred. Alan describes it simply as “the best show ever.”
A month and half later, the Girls were on a boat, heading through the Strait of Malacca on their way to the Sumatran city of Medan. With nothing better to do, the trio asked the boat’s lounge act to hand over their electric instruments for a set. The band ripped through what one might call a “typical” Sun City Girls set: “House of the Rising Sun,”“Esta Susan En Casa?” from Horse Cock Phepner , and a sun-baked skronkjam peppered with abrupt stops and starts. The Indonesian audience clapped at the beginning of every song, and then clapped again at the end. Like nearly all Girls performances, this one was recorded, and Rick reports that at one point on the tape you can hear a patron lean over to his companion and proclaim: “Ah, this is American jazz!”
Purists might have trouble with this description, although SCG are more than capable of pounding out Duke Ellington and Paul Bley tunes. But if jazz means a deep commitment to improvisation, and if improvisation means having the guts to force the hand of chance, then Sun City Girls are most certainly jazz.
They are most certainly not purists. Sun City Girls traffic with bizarre miscegenations, self-indulgent trash, and hardcore mystic exotica. Their sometimes garish album covers attack the eye with devils, yonis, sacred transvestites, and nubile native jailbait. Lyrics, song, and album
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