There are times, listening to Richard Bishop do his thing with Sun City Girls, when this reviewer thinks, “Everyone else can stop playing their guitars now.” A few of those moments occur at points during the 92 minutes of music included on Three Lobed’s reissue of tracks from two of the Sun City Girls’ late-1980s Cloaven Cassettes: Famous Asthma (1987) and Tibetan Jazz 666 (1988). For listeners not tuned in to the vagaries of the Sun City Girls’ prolific output, the Cloaven Cassettes were self-released tapes, often composed of performances of the band at its loosest and weirdest, and the Sun City Girls could get very, very weird. Most of what you’ll hear on this reissue is the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher in improvisation, working a blend of mutant jazz,…
Tag Archive: Sun City Girls
The Sun City Girls were unlike any band before them or that has come in their wake. Their catalog, their ethos, their *being* – you name it, with the Girls that “it” was singular and became legend. This singularity started early and extended to their release schedule and the means behind the same. While the band would prove to be wildly prolific throughout their existence, during their nascent days they quickly realized that they could not be contained by any sort of traditional label schedule. Ideas were simply coming to the trio too rapidly to even entertain the notion of being constrained by the possibility of “only” releasing at most two albums a year. To best answer the flood of ideas the name of the game was move fast, record, release and move onto the next concept.