SRB ALBUM REVIEWS
THE FREAK OF ARABY (Drag City)
This time out, Bishop jettisons the guitar soli approach that's defined the majority of his solo stuff. But he does so only after first clobbering the listener with a magnificent example of the form, "Taqasim For Omar". The Omar in question on this particular guitar improvisation is the late Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid, whom Bishop credits in interviews as a major inspiration for this whole project. One minute into the second track, "Enta Omri", we're introduced to the Freak of Araby Ensemble, where they tastefully lay down tablas, bass, and doubled-up guitar until the final number, "Blood-Stained Sands", which is all reeds (Moroccan chanter horns) and percussion.
Half the songs on The Freak of Araby are covers of Middle Eastern tunes, and the other half are originals. Bishop is half-Lebanese, so it's tempting to see this as some kind of "back to the roots" affair. In the Detroit suburb where he grew up, Rick and his brother Alan were exposed to a lot of Middle Eastern music; their grandfather used to play the oud and a double-reeded flute as well as records by the likes of Fairuz and Oum Kalthoum. If you hear echoes of Morricone or surf music here, that makes sense-- pretty much any time you amplify Middle Eastern jams you realize how far that approach to sound has reached. You hear the Morricone because both Bishop and Morricone are masters at synthesizing disparate sounds from different cultures; too bad they've never gotten to collaborate.
The band, consisting of guitarist Rasheed Al-Qahira, percussionist Mohammed Bandari, bassist Ahmed Sharif, and hand drummer Abdulla Basheem, is ace. It's true that a few songs could be a tad dirtier, more unhinged; undoubtedly they will in performance (at the time of this writing Bishop's on a North American tour with the group). Bishop's take on the lovely Corsican melody "Solenzara", for example, never leaves the earth, but it's not supposed to. That happens enough on the original "Sidi Mansour", anyway. Then there's the knotty yet hummable "Barbary", which has echoes of the Sun City Girls' Torch of the Mystics. Like that record, Freak is one of Bishop's most cohesive and accessible albums. Since it also has such an NPR-friendly backstory, expect Bishop to appear on Terry Gross soon. Which means you can also expect a record composed entirely of synth dirge nursery rhymes about circumcision next time around. That, or a Sammy Davis, Jr. tribute record. Or both - Mike McGonigal (PITCHFORK)
The opening track creeps in with catacombic echo and reverb, an eerie noise reminiscent of being inside a submarine as the ocean’s pressure is squeezing the floating metal tomb for all its worth. An alien chant arises, reverberating menacingly as waves of feedback sweep from speaker to speaker. The orator — no doubt some sort of cloaked, degenerate cult figure — eventually summons a heaving, sinister laugh, just in time for the pummeling, metal-scraping beat to wreak havoc in its sea of swelling drones and submerged feedback. This is certainly not one of those folksy explorations that Bishop has received attention for in the indie community over the last few years; this is a return to his Sun City Girls days, when the only goal was a demented output laughingly teased with as many eclectic styles as possible.
What kind of visuals could possibly accompany such a troubled sound? Demonic visuals. Bishop, like his Sun City Girls bandmates and fans, is a collector of the weird. The Girls’ ethos as a band was to accumulate as many odd influences from the furthest corners of the earth and mash them together into an amalgamated sound so untraceable it became something completely new. Bishop approaches his visual creations in the same way. For God Damn Religion, he pieces together a 30-minute montage of found imagery steeped in the negative side of religions based in the sacred-versus-profane domains. From intricately painted and dementedly graphic depictions of a Christian Hell to clips of an impish black-and-white movie filmed in Sweden during the Twenties — from pornography of all eras and cultures to mirrored stills of indigenous people and religious ceremonies. The pseudo-documentary culls awe-inspiring products of the human imagination as influenced by the diabolical, fiendish and impious side of religion.
As he does in his songwriting, Bishop edits in a continuously shifting manner. Though most of the visuals presented here are taken from paintings and illustrations, he films the stills with intentionally unsettling hand-held jerks and scans. As each thematic collection of images lurches into the next, Bishop often changes the pace of the edits, ranging from the slow pans and dissolves of Bangkok’s phallic garden shrine to the chaotic cuts of the fiercely tormenting animalistic and otherworldly figures near the film’s end. He does an excellent job of matching the ferocity of the imagery with his editing, utilizing the context and curiosity of the visuals to decide momentum.
And of course there’s Bishop’s original soundtrack. The music is a reactive product of each montage’s cultural origins and intensity. For example, during a mellow assortment of Christian art ranging from the Byzantine Empire up to the 19th century, Bishop crafts a mood out of heavily reverberated organ, recreating the hollow pipe organ sound synonymous with Western churches. When the imagery turns somewhat comical as it does during a collection of animated Luciferic figures, the music becomes carnival-esque for a more playful tone. For a segment of Eastern Asian art, Bishop utilizes thundering, almost gong-sounding drums to further transport the viewer into the focused cultural setting, however skewed it might be.
There is not an over-arching narrative to God Damn Religion; Bishop seems to intentionally keep the context sparse. Rather than trying to craft some sort of message out of the images, he simply assembles them into a loosely organized structure and unleashes them onto one’s eyes, which along with one’s brain, struggle to keep up with the onslaught of truly mind-boggling imagery. He uses the soundtrack to accentuate the mood, but other than that, there is not much more he can do to heighten this already baffling collection of visuals. This is a package so outstandingly perverse and sinister that it makes you truly doubt the sanity of your fellow man. Then again, any reaction less severe would surely disappoint an artist as iconoclastic as Bishop. - Michael Ardaiolo for Stop Smiling Magazine
He played around the world with the Sun City Girls for 26 years, and has released six solo albums in the last decade, but Polytheistic Fragments still feels like guitarist Sir Richard Bishop's international debut. It's his first record on Drag City, but more importantly, it's his widest-ranging one yet, a joyful trip through his many styles, influences, and obsessions. Most of Bishop's previous albums have had a stricter range, be it the improvised acoustics of Improvika, the electronic atmospheres of Elektronika Demonika, or the long-form experiments of While My Guitar Violently Bleeds, released earlier this year.
But Fragments is a spectacular showcase of Bishop's multi-dimensional talents. Here we get fast-picked folk, Django Reinhardt-worthy gypsy tunes, Chet Atkins-style ditties, Hindi-influenced melodies, and a lode of other, less classifiable stuff. Interestingly, this catholic approach is closest in tone to Bishop's actual solo debut, 1998's Salvador Kali, which also freely rolled his polygonal sonic dice. But even compared to that stellar release, Fragments is remarkably kaleidoscopic.
It's also Bishop's most ear-catching work so far. His playing is still open and exploratory, but nearly every track is also hummable. Opener "Cross My Palm With Silver" begins with typical Reinhardt-ish sketches, but halfway in coalesces into a sneaky rolling hook. "Elysium Number Five" matches that with a snake-like lead line, and "Free Masonic Guitar", made almost solely of ringing strums, builds melody from sheer momentum. Bishop has always been a stunning player, picking through blinding runs in a flash. But here his ability to think fast and play even faster is employed solely in service of songcraft. The album's centerpiece, the ten-minute piano meditation "Saraswati", might seem like an exception to Fragments' melodicism, with its searching tones and chilly drone. But as writer Grayson Currin recently pointed out, listen closely and the track seems to nick the melody from the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows", stretching it into revelatory slow motion.
One would imagine that "Saraswati" would be too daunting an achievement to follow, but in fact, Polytheistic Fragments' three final tracks are the album's best. "Tennessee Porch Swing" is an unabashed country-road stroll, while "Canned Goods & Firearms" channels the bounce of Chet Atkins. And "Ecstasies in the Open Air" is the record's ultimate charmer, a denouement whose halting acoustics melt perfectly into a soaring flute line. It's probably the softest, dreamiest thing you'll ever hear Bishop play, but like the rest of Polytheistic Fragments, its gentle bliss fits perfectly inside this sound-painter's rainbow palette. - Marc Masters, October 01, 2007
WHILE MY GUITAR VIOLENTLY BLEEDS (Locust Music)
Until now, Sir Richard Bishop’s solo career has taken a very different tack from the course steered by the Sun City Girls. Bishop’s recently disbanded trio with his brother Alan and recently deceased drummer Charles Gocher operated more like an offensive against cultural preconceptions of quality and truth than a music group, but his solo albums have foregone Mexican wrestling show hosts, conspiracy-theory spinning radio plays, Asian pop covers (and singing in general) and sharp-angled free-form rock in favor of mostly acoustic instrumentals played mostly on guitar that amalgamate ’30s swing jazz, ’50s country picking, a touch of free improv, and the myriad strains of string music envisioned between Tangiers and Calcutta. While Bishop hasn’t abandoned course, he does seem to be working with a more Girlish map here, starting with the album’s cover art. The record’s cover uses a disturbing and impossible to ignore found image, a 16th century Flemish painting of a bare-breasted gentlewoman stabbing herself to death; its title places a contemptuous boot-heel upon good taste and gives it a good, hard shove. This should all sound familiar to SCGs fans. The music also ventures closer to the trio’s work without compromising Bishop’s fundamentally musical focus. He’s given each track an exotic title, but if he opted for functionality he could have just said “Long,” “A Bit Longer,” and “Longest.” The solo acoustic piece “Zurvan,” which runs nearly seven minutes, opens the disc in immensely appealing but fairly familiar territory by spinning out stirring flamenco patterns before breaking into a Hindustani gallop. It would have fit perfectly on Fingering The Devil or Improvika. The 11-minute long “Smashana” sounds like nothing else in Bishop’s solo oeuvre. It opens with an e-bowed drone that sounds like a call to prayer, but within seconds several distorted electric guitars pour feedback and clanking distortion over the drone like channels of boiling oil coursing down a stone wall. As the piece progresses, ghostly wails of uncertain provenance waft out of the hellish maelstrom; they could be the voices of immolated would-be worshippers on the ground, or of vampiric visitors snatching the victims souls, but whatever ever they are, they impart a grippingly malevolent vibe that would sound just right on a Sun City Girls record. “Mahavidya” takes its sweet time - 25 minutes- to pull you out of the darkness. It begins with Bishop striking languid acoustic figures over an undulating tambura drone, working myriad variations on a theme that never seems to wear out. His playing sounds quite Indian, even though his guitar technique doesn’t sound terribly idiomatic. Rather, he evokes the feel of a raga’s accelerating intensity towards a glorious climax through pacing and thrilling rhythmic accents. When it’s done, you’ll feel like you’ve been somewhere worth visiting again - Bill Meyer (in Dusted Magazine).
Sir Richard Bishop, guitarist of the Sun City Girls, released the instrumental album “While My Guitar Violently Bleeds” last month. The title’s variation from the song it references seems far from incidental; Charles Gocher, drummer of Sun City Girls, passed away in February, leaving behind bandmates Richard and Alan Bishop. This album marks Bishop’s first release since the band’s end. Although the material was recorded prior to Gocher’s death, the title contextualizes the music as a bold form of mourning. While the emotions on the album range widely, from the tense dread of “Zurvan” to the chaos of “Smashana”, this is an unmistakably dark release. Listening to a guitar album requires a different sort of listening than when hearing a full band; the guitar must simultaneously evoke an ego or a protagonist as well as the world that this personality inhabits. Sometimes these elements might only be felt as an absence; a spare melody will feel lost with no sound-bed and the listener will cling to any suggestion of a melody amidst layers of ambient saturation. Bishop plays games with the landscapes and personalities of his compositions, making “While My Guitar Gently Bleeds” a disorienting experience. As the album cover hints, this music is a masterful self-annihilation, terrifying in its graceful and single-minded drive towards the destruction of its own narrative. Melodies wander just long enough to hint at a structure, before veering off into unexpected directions. All that lingers from these teasing ventures are the formless emotions they elicit. Bishop’s melodic figures leave the listener stranded, by pulling him or her into certain moods and then dissolving without offering an escape. Perhaps this is how the album captures the mourning that its title both references and denies. The flamenco-tinged “Zurvan” begins the album with two minutes of dramatic guitar quotes, suspending the formation of the narrative for a good while. Bishop then transforms these figures into a more organized composition; flurries of notes gradually increase in intensity, and return to the same dissonant cadence just often enough to draw these fragments together. “Smashana” consists of disorienting, but hypnotic, guitar squeals on top of a lush bed of ambient howls and echoes. This track veers towards drone-like boredom, so it perhaps serves best as a bridge between the two more interesting pieces. Bishop transitions out of the turbulence of “Smashana” with “Mahavidya”. At first, this twenty-five minute piece seems just as disorienting, although much more friendly; the squeals and blasts of ambience soften, as Bishop performs playful acoustic guitar fragments above undulating tambura buzzes. Like in the album’s first half, Bishop delivers a series of dramatic melodic figures that only cohere in their mood, rather than as a progression. The problematic melodic fragments, however, reveal a shade of joy missing from the rest of the album. The listener is still subjected to the same brutality and wandering emotions, but Bishop turns this aimless violence into a triumph. Across its forty-three minutes, Bishop’s release lacks a narration and closure that one might hope to find within a statement of grief. Nonetheless Bishop still can manipulate the emotional tones of his songs through his melodic fragments. Without sacrificing its blind fury and chaos, the album eventually achieves happiness while finding neither peace nor resolution. The length of the tracks may make this album a bit difficult to access, but with serious attention, “While My Guitar Violently Bleeds” proves to be a striking listen - Scott Coomes (The Stanford Daily).
Do you believe in magic? Neither do I except for when I’m hearing Sir Richard Bishop play that guitar. The mystic man from Sun City Girls gives us his most satisfying recording yet this time around entitled While My Guitar Violently Bleeds, released on the Locust Music label. As far as solo acoustic guitar, it goes Django, Fahey, Bishop in my book. I’m not saying Rick is better than Eddie Lang or Basho (although I’d be completely willing to take up the argument) I’m just saying he’s better than every young gun folkie under the white hot sun. He’s even better than most of the greats. If you don’t believe me check out the sidelong raga “Mahavidya”. I don’t know what spirits are being channeled here, I just know that its power, texture and technique add up to music of a higher nature, transcending time and space, taking the listener to other places. There is a joy that can only be found therein. Are you aware enough to take the ride? Note to Rick: Next time you’re in NYC come up to the office and play us a tune. We can smoke cigarettes in the stairwell. - Steve Lowenthal (Fader Magazine).
FINGERING THE DEVIL (Southern Records)
Fingering the Devil is a gem -- while not the first solo outing by Sun City Girl, Sir Richard Bishop, it might be the first to really capture what this protean guitar inventor really sounds like live. In the wake of the Fahey revival, the solo acoustic guitar album has once again become a familiar form to many, but I still think its safe to say that here, Sir Rick is in a class all his own. The songs on this record -- which you may recognize if you've seen him play recently -- exude a strange combination of contemplation and ecstasy, for even as deft classical runs careen into outbursts machine gun raga drone, Bishop somehow manages to make that ecstatic sense of catharsis feel at once liberating and firmly grounded. The influence of Indian raga is evident and should come as no surprise given the Sun City Girl's long standing relationship to the subcontinent. What is perhaps less well noted is the heavy respects Bishop pays to Gypsy-jazzman Django Reinhardt, with whom Bishop shares a sense of charmed ease and mystery. The tracks are perfectly arranged and flow together in a way that makes this record a joy to listen to side to side. Printed in an edition of 700 and packaged in a sleeve designed by Stephen O'Malley of SunnO))), Fingering the Devil is also one of the coolest looking LPs ever -- the disc is clear vinyl with gray marbling, and looks more like the eye of some giant mythical creature than an LP. Part of Southern Record's Latitude series and highly recommended - Che Chen (Other Music)
From the opening ghost town scene to the deserted station Sir Richard Bishop’s train heads out of at the end of Fingering the Devil, his ability to evoke stories where there aren’t words proves he is alone in doing just that. And he does that so well that the kind folks at Southern Studios Latitudes series (GMT 0:07). On the liner notes, Bishop recounts the tale of a near impossible session with Harvey Birrell - the curating engineer for the series. Bonkered train schedules, rain drenching his guitar case, (which suffered a broken handle along the way) and closed tube stations barely let Bishop arrive at Birrell’s doorstep to a warm cup of coffee. His fingers can be heard drying out as they tap dance erratic fills up and down the frets and land, out of breath, on sadder minor notes. He leads us through sad lullabies to Anglo Saxon seeming battle hymns on "Dream of the Lotus Eaters". I can pick up the same medieval curiosity that fascinated groups like Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull. There is an air of discovery and forlorn emotion as every nuance and finger slide can be heard by the squeaks of his strings. The imagery moves into an enchanted forest where listeners are spun around and lost in the EP’s title track. Then in "Spanish Bastard", two brute forces can be heard scuffling and kicking up dirt on the hollow wood guitar as Bishop plays to one’s demise. The ornate packaging on this release is, by itself, a treasure. As I stare at the cover of the cardboard folding case with a white ink border, the center puzzles me. It is an image of a hand making a peace sign or bunny ears. What looks so iconic about it is the silver pressed foil into the cardboard — the silver part being the shadow of the hand gesture. After a few minutes… a lot of them, I notice the animal the shadow is formed as. It looks like an evil lamb with extra long horns or a devil. I feel like there is supposed to be something symbolic about it beyond what I see…could it be that the hand in question is from a robed figure…possibly Jesus? Could it just be a smart move on the part of Bishop to leave us filling in all the blanks - Southern Records
Richard Bishop, one third of the carnival folklorists the Sun City Girls, must have a hell of a lot of frequent flyer miles. On previous releases his guitar sound has resided in pastoral English gardens, the thick-aired swamps of Louisiana, and secluded Indian mandirs. On his new album “Fingering the Devil,” for Southern records imprint Latitudes, Bishop focuses his frantic melodies on the Carpathian Mountains and Andalusia. In the album’s linear notes Bishop provides an account of exhausting trip to Southern’s London studio in the midst of 2005’s terrorist frenzy. This provides a natural introduction to the music itself. Bishop’s gypsy guitar echoes with a restless energy and an understated sadness. It paints pictures of snuffed fires, rain-soaked canopies, and the steady rhythm of wagon wheels. These songs follow the trend of many contemporary gypsy jazz players by incorporating Latin and Spanish rhythms. On the several songs such as “Spanish Bastard,” and “Gypsum,” the ghost of Ramón Montoya floats forward in the mix. Bishop’s seamless blend of gypsy jazz and flamenco guitar embraces the duality of nomadic life, its exuberance and world-weariness. Overall Bishop’s pace is slightly slower here than on his previous full length "Improvika" except on the album’s galloping closer “Howrah Station.” In “Dance of the Lotus Eaters,” he scatters his notes sparingly in sections and coaxes the steady growth of melodies from single chords, rather than frantic runs across the fret board. Bishop also embraces these gently melodies more fully, shying away from the experimental atonality of "Improvika"’s “Cryptonymous.” This release is a return to the mode set by Bishop’s first solo adventure 1998’s "Salvador Kali," full of patience and powerful lyricism - Jamie Townsend for Foxy Digitalis
IMPROVIKA (Locust Music)
The legacy of John Fahey and other founders of so-called “American primitive guitar” is finding voice in a new generation of acoustic steel-string instrumentalists who have yet to make their impact felt much beyond the underground neo-acid-folk circles of Devendra Banhardt, Joanna Newsom, et al. A founding member of the longstanding indie-rock trio Sun City Girls, Sir Richard Bishop proudly exhibits his allegiances to Fahey (his 1998 solo debut, Salvador Kali, appeared on Fahey’s Revenant label) and Robbie Basho. Bishop gives his pieces titles like “Cryptonymus” and “Rudra’s Feast”; he creates abstract and dissonant fingerstyle webs that evoke those famous LSD experiments with spiders; and he stretches out in long raga-influenced improvisations that accelerate into flatpicked furies. Capable of cobbling together complex musical ideas at frenetic tempos, Bishop makes little effort to polish the rough edges of his playing or homogenize his attack and timbres, even when he slows to the contemplative pace of walking meditation. His music is more about the simultaneous exploration of sonic possibilities and fleeting emotions than pristine technique. Occasional Spanish melodies and Middle Eastern drones echo similar elements in the music of his forebears and connect Bishop’s solo guitar work to the “ethnic avant-garage rock” of his Sun City Girls recordings - Derk Richardson (ACOUSTIC GUITAR MAGAZINE)
Thanks to his prolific activities as a member of the omnivorous improvisational juggernaut Sun City Girls, Sir Richard Bishop's guitar case has surely gathered stickers from more exotic ports of call than any merchant marine's steamer trunk. SCG's extensive travels, both temporal and otherwise, have enabled Bishop to cast his net globally to incorporate numberless strains of Middle Eastern, Pan-Asian, and North African flavors into his distinctive instrumental style. In 1998, Bishop released his first solo album-- the exquisite Salvador Kali-- on John Fahey's Revenant label. Containing pieces for solo guitar and piano, the album revealed a delicate lyricism not always evident on themore savage and protean SCG releases such as Valentines from Matahari. Last year, Bishop followed up Kali with a lengthy contribution to Locust's Wooden Guitar collection, which also featured pieces from the kindred guitar spirits of Steffen Basho-Junghans, Jack Rose, and Tetuzi Akiyama. This compilation worked so well that apparently Locust now intends the Wooden Guitar series to be ongoing, and Improvika is the first step on that voyage. Improvika features an unaccompanied Bishop on a steel-string wooden guitar, and as its title implies his playing here sounds considerably more extemporaneous and free-flowing than on the more composed, stately Salvador Kali. Each of these nine songs is easily digestible portion, with track lengths in the three- to eight-minute range. The sonic disembarkation point of Bishop's solo work lands him somewhere in the fertile geography between the Eastern mysticism of Robbie Basho and the freewheeling gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt. But his influences are too obscure and far-reaching to constrain him to even that immense landscape (perhaps his work is best classified as one song title here appropriately puts it: "Provenance Unknown"), and on Improvika he explores and links a worldwide series of underground caverns and alleyways. One minute, the bewitching, multi-colored scarves of "Rudra's Feast" dance and swirl before your eyes, and the next things segue abruptly into the percussive, Derek Bailey-like dissonance of "Cryptonymus". The Spanish-flavored "Rose Secretions" sounds like the priest preparing his vestments before praying above a fallen toreador, while the stormy chords that cap "Skull of Sidon" seem to signal mysterious ceremonies of a much darker order. Throughout the album, Bishop displays a virtuosity that borders on the flabbergasting. On high-wired tracks like "Jaisalmer" it sounds as though he leaves no portion of the fretboard untouched, and he moves with such frantic dexterity that it's difficult to imagine someone's mind operating that quickly, let alone their fingers. Rather than mere technical proficiency, however, it's Bishop's uncanny ability to translate and synthesize the many and varied tongues of his antecedents that makes Improvika so intoxicating - Matthew Murphy (PITCHFORK)
When a musician’s reputation is based on being a virtuoso it’s often tiresome to listen to their music. When the focus of something is based on technical prowess rather than artistic intent it quickly becomes a pointless exercise. In a grand attempt at displaying his skill the virtuoso places his ego above musical substance resulting in a performance that quickly decays into a dazzling yet meaningless display of talent. Knowing this, it would be easy to say that Sir Richard Bishop’s new recording of solo acoustic guitar pieces is just that – a vehicle to showcase his remarkable talent. Fortunately, “Improvika” is none of these things. While it can’t be disputed that Bishop is a remarkable talent, he should be applauded for recording an album of virtuoso guitar music that has a focus not on skill but sound and composition. Much like the Sun City Girls’ music, the nine compositions of “Improvika” are influenced by folk music of all corners of the world with the music of India and the Middle East playing particularly prominent roles. This is not, however, post-modern pastiche or multicultural collage. Quite the contrary, it is something that synthesizes all these disparate elements into something wholly new. Bishop has a somewhat improvisational rhythmic language that is all his own as well as a compositional sense that (even if these pieces are, in fact, improvisations as the title might suggest) carries this album easily through its 45 minute running time.It’s unclear what role Bishop’s interest in the occult plays on this album but listening to “Improvika” it’s hard not to believe this is the sound of a possessed man playing guitar. Bishop’s music has an austere and pristine quality to it that makes him an absolute pleasure to listen to and, unlike some of his contemporaries, I could listen to him play for hours without ever tiring. With many tracks sounding very similar to Indian Raga there is an unspoken spiritual, almost trance-like aspect to this music that is at once arresting and sublime. Sir Richard Bishop is not only a master of his instrument but also a master of the craft of music itself, displaying knowledge and wisdom far beyond that of most music being made today. “Improvika” is a true gem - Nick Hennies (Foxy Digitalis)
Sir Richard Bishop’s day job is with the Sun City Girls and the Sublime Frequencies label, but those two pieces of information are mighty misleading. Bishop’s solo guitar work has thus far had little to do with the sound of the Girls and even less to do with the output of Sublime Frequencies. Instead, his solo guitar work falls neatly in line with a long line of forbearers and contemporaries that are seeking to unearth hidden trails left to pursue on the instrument. Last year’s Wooden Guitar compilation proved this idea without a shadow of a doubt, revealing a healthy culture that has emerged from underneath the long shadows of both John Fahey and Leo Kottke. Taking elements from these two masters of the genre, each artist on the compilation added or subtracted important elements from the existing canon, emerging with wholly original works. Bishop’s particular formations are a careful mixture of both Delta blues and Middle Eastern ragas. For every eight minute trance-inducing epic, there’s a three-minute ditty just around the corner. And while the whole experiment sounds to be a match dreamed up by a madman, the combination works beautifully, adding exciting new keys into the blues idiom and a brevity to those songs that once took eternities to build into something interesting. “Rudra’s Feast” is the gem here, working its way through a variety of ideas in its eight minute length, but culminating in the most electrically charged moment of the disc via its climactic moments. While the playing is sloppy (you can nearly hear Bishop’s hand falling off the guitar at points, but miraculously righting itself on the way up), but that isn’t really the point either. Instead, “Rudra’s Ghost” acts as a litmus test for the listener: do you prefer the controlled and subtleties of Jack Rose? Or would you prefer to listen to a punk version of Basho-Junghans? It’s the question that you’ll have to answer for yourself over Improvika’s 46 minute running time, but one that I’ve found myself struggling with for far longer than that. On the one hand, overt passion in the playing is an element that’s sorely lacking in the examples of the Wooden Guitar artists on Locust. On the other, there has to be a level that they maintain before indulging themselves too greatly. Luckily, Bishop is far too talented to let things fall into that trap and Improvika serves as a reminder to the many avenues still left to the instrumental guitarist - Sarah Kahrl (STYLUS MAGAZINE)
SALVADOR KALI (Revenant Records)
That this solo instrumental album from one of the Sun City Girls would come out on John Fahey's Revenant label isn't a surprise at all once one hears the opening romp, "Burning Caravan." There's the same sense of artistic reach, delicacy, and skill on guitar that one would expect from Fahey, but, of course, Bishop has his own particular obsessions and roots, which he showcases well throughout. Besides having a punning title, Salvador Kali also indicates the breadth of Bishop's musical roots from Europe to Asia and beyond, drawing much like his parent band on any number of worldwide sources and sounding like something he almost created out of thin air. Bishop plays guitar, harmonium, and piano, with no other guests necessary for his excellent work. Overdubbing creates the illusion of more than one performer, and such is his empathy for his work that it does often sound like a live duo or trio going at it. A variety of short and skillful tracks surface throughout, like the jaunty "Pedro's Last Ride," with a flamenco-touched lead line over a rhythmic series of chords, and the enchanting final song, "Morella." The total standouts are the longer ones, though, where Bishop shows off his chops without sounding like pointless technical flash at all. "Rasheed" is the first, its extensive acoustic midsection a lovely stunner in his brisk, constantly changing playing, from slower fingerpicking to sudden fretboard runs. "Al-Darazi," as could be guessed from the title, plays around with Arabic and nearby regional melodies, beginning with a heavily echoed piano part that continues and develops into a marvelous showcase for both the instrument and his own skills. "Kamakhya" mixes acoustic guitar with harmonium for an at once dreamy and sprightly performance, well worth the listening to by anyone interested in drone pieces even though it doesn't sound like a stereotypical drone - Ned Raggett (All Music Guide)
Solo albums by guitarists from well-established rock bands are notoriously vain affairs that are nearly always bereft of the qualities that made their bands great in the first place. But the ultra-prolific, 10,000 Leagues Under The Ground trio Sun City Girls aren't your average rock band, and Salvador Kali isn't your average punt down the ego river. The "Girls" (actually three guys) can and do commit to disc just about anything that comes to their collective mind, from arcane radio plays to ethnographic forgeries to twisted rock epics, so if guitarist Rick Bishop wanted to indulge himself he's already got the appropriate venue. Instead this record is marked by its discipline; whether they last two minutes or fifteen, each piece is defined and purposeful. Bishop is a splendid acoustic guitarist with a sure touch and an impressive vocabulary gleaned from the Spanish flamenco and North Indian classical traditions with a bit of Belgian Django Reinhardt's gypsy swing jazz mixed in. For variety he tosses in a Moorish piano fantasia that conjures images of kif-addled cowboys doing sabre dances. Some of Bishop's compositions isolate one influence, others melt them together, but all of them possess a singular grace that deserves to be heard far beyond the confines of underground rock - Bill Meyer (Ink Blot Magazine)
