titles—”Naga Smoke Signals,” “The Genghis Necro-Nama-Khan,” 330,003 Crossdressers from Beyond the Rig Veda —can sound like the spontaneous verse of young poètes maudits tanked up on National Geographic cheesecake and A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural . This lurid romance with the Other fuels some of their most incandescent sounds as well, a music of transport that explores Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, and South American atmospheres with a passion composed equally of informed pleasure and the heedless appropriation of the strange. Looking high and low, far and wide, the Sun City Girls have sought the wellsprings of the weird, of what H.P. Lovecraft called outsideness , and when they have found them, they have taken what they wanted. On that boat in Indonesia, they got to give some of it back.
Sun City Girls released the first of their countless recordings in 1984, and since that time they have become probably the most prodigious, uncompromising and caustically esoteric band in the American post-punk underground. Musical chameleons, they have performed tantric space jams, out jazz, riff rock, Sumatran pop covers, spaghetti-western soundtracks, and haunted folk songs worthy of Harry Smith. But they started out simply jamming, back in that trailer park in Tempe, Arizona, their three instruments creating a whirlwind of noise that Alan compares to a nuclear explosion.
“It was like we discovered this switch,” he says.“ Without really playing together very long we were listening and improvising and hitting synchronicities that we didn’t even think were possible. Within a twenty minute piece, we were stopping on dimes, not even looking at each other, fifteen times. Rick and I would hit eight or nine straight notes, the exact same notes, with Charlie accenting them. How the fuck is that done?”
According to Forced Exposure ’s Byron Coley, Sun City Girls were “the first truly crazy band to emerge from the shards of hardcore. At first they seemed almost like a goofus prank being played by post-core stoners, but by the time that Torch of the Mystics was released, they were absolutely amazing and obviously pure of heart.” When Majora released Torch in 1990, Coley helped spread the news, and the album’s astral cabaret of voodoo folk jams and dark ethno-psychedelic rites remains the band’s most celebrated release. According to Coley, Sun City Girls laid the foundation for today’s new American sub-underground. “Without these french-fried, grass-skirted motherfuckers it would all sound like Merzbow.”
Sun City Girls also became some of the most original performers in American rock. Simultaneously wanting to shock, amaze, and irritate, the Girls used the stage as a platform for snotty tricks and bravura experiments that tested both themselves and their audiences. One night they played nothing but an extended version of a single soul tune; another night they executed a perfect cover of Jodorowsky’s El Topo soundtrack; and sometimes they just ditched their instruments altogether. Once, opening for fellow travelers Thinking Fellers Union Local 242 at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall, the trio donned cheap Radio Shack wireless mics, plopped down on the stage, and improv’d a group of hobos waiting for a train while a prerecorded fifty-minute tape of crickets ground toward the inevitable whistle moan. Their longtime sound engineer Scott Colburn came on and danced a tramp jig, while Gocher sprayed peach air freshener in the air and threw marshmallows around, ruining the carpet.
“That’s classic Sun City Girls,” says Colburn. “You get what you get.”
With their monster touring days behind them, a Sun City Girls gig is a rare affair that draws the converted. In November of 2003, I was lucky enough to catch an unadvertised all-acoustic show at the Rendezvous, a jewel box theater in Seattle’s Belltown that looks like a padded cell for mad Napoleons. Their first gig in
Sun City Girls released the first of their countless recordings in 1984, and since that time they have become probably the most prodigious, uncompromising and caustically esoteric band in the American post-punk underground. Musical chameleons, they have performed tantric space jams, out jazz, riff rock, Sumatran pop covers, spaghetti-western soundtracks, and haunted folk songs worthy of Harry Smith. But they started out simply jamming, back in that trailer park in Tempe, Arizona, their three instruments creating a whirlwind of noise that Alan compares to a nuclear explosion.
“It was like we discovered this switch,” he says.“ Without really playing together very long we were listening and improvising and hitting synchronicities that we didn’t even think were possible. Within a twenty minute piece, we were stopping on dimes, not even looking at each other, fifteen times. Rick and I would hit eight or nine straight notes, the exact same notes, with Charlie accenting them. How the fuck is that done?”
According to Forced Exposure ’s Byron Coley, Sun City Girls were “the first truly crazy band to emerge from the shards of hardcore. At first they seemed almost like a goofus prank being played by post-core stoners, but by the time that Torch of the Mystics was released, they were absolutely amazing and obviously pure of heart.” When Majora released Torch in 1990, Coley helped spread the news, and the album’s astral cabaret of voodoo folk jams and dark ethno-psychedelic rites remains the band’s most celebrated release. According to Coley, Sun City Girls laid the foundation for today’s new American sub-underground. “Without these french-fried, grass-skirted motherfuckers it would all sound like Merzbow.”
Sun City Girls also became some of the most original performers in American rock. Simultaneously wanting to shock, amaze, and irritate, the Girls used the stage as a platform for snotty tricks and bravura experiments that tested both themselves and their audiences. One night they played nothing but an extended version of a single soul tune; another night they executed a perfect cover of Jodorowsky’s El Topo soundtrack; and sometimes they just ditched their instruments altogether. Once, opening for fellow travelers Thinking Fellers Union Local 242 at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall, the trio donned cheap Radio Shack wireless mics, plopped down on the stage, and improv’d a group of hobos waiting for a train while a prerecorded fifty-minute tape of crickets ground toward the inevitable whistle moan. Their longtime sound engineer Scott Colburn came on and danced a tramp jig, while Gocher sprayed peach air freshener in the air and threw marshmallows around, ruining the carpet.
“That’s classic Sun City Girls,” says Colburn. “You get what you get.”
With their monster touring days behind them, a Sun City Girls gig is a rare affair that draws the converted. In November of 2003, I was lucky enough to catch an unadvertised all-acoustic show at the Rendezvous, a jewel box theater in Seattle’s Belltown that looks like a padded cell for mad Napoleons. Their first gig in
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