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• SIR RICHARD BISHOP
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• THE PHANTOM FAMILY HALO
• TRAD GRAS OCH STENAR
• WILDILDLIFE

SIR RICHARD BISHOP

BIOGRAPHY

Richard Bishop was a founding member (along with brother Alan) of Ethnic-Improv pioneers and DIY tricksters Sun City Girls, who during their 26-year reign had over 50 full length albums, plus over 20 one-hour cassettes and a dozen 7” records. That being said, Richard has spent more than a quarter century perplexing, amazing, and alienating audiences exactly as planned. In early 2005, Richard (as Sir Richard Bishop) began extensive touring as a solo artist, performing throughout Europe, Australia, and the United States. Though the good Sir is known mostly for his acoustic playing, he has recently been performing with electric guitars in a solo setting. Sir Richard’s guitar explorations often reflect the shadow worlds of India, North Africa and the Middle East, and other points along the Gypsy trail, though many strange and experimental forms have crept into the live shows as of late. One can usually recognize the influences of Omar Khorshid, Django Reinhardt, Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar in his playing, though he has fused these and many other influential elements into his own unique style.

During the last 4 years he has shared the stage with the likes of Lydia Lunch, the Dead C, OOIOO, Animal Collective, Om, Joanna Newsom, Pan Sonic, and Os Mutantes, to name a few. He has done extensive touring (and performed live with) Earth, Bonny Prince Billy, Six Organs of Admittance, Devendra Banhart, Bill Callahan, and others. Sir Richard’s first solo record, Salvador Kali, was released by John Fahey’s esteemed Revenant label in 1998. Several years passed before Locust Music issued his second record, Improvika, in 2004. This, as the title suggests, was a completely improvised album, as was the follow up, Fingering the Devil, which was recorded at an impromptu session at London’s Southern Studios on a day off during the 2005 European tour. This was followed by two more releases from Locust Music. The first was Elektronika Demonika, which consisted of ear-splitting, creepy electronics, and contained no guitar at all. After that came While My Guitar Violently Bleeds, which is made up of three lengthy compositions for acoustic and electric guitar.

2007 saw the first Sir Richard release from Drag City. The album, Polytheistic Fragments, consisted of varying styles and instrumentations, from solo acoustic pieces, to electric guitar gallops, some strange avant wanderings on lapsteel guitar, and even a couple of piano compositions. A brand new and “somewhat different” release will be issued on Drag City in early summer of this year. That’s all that can be said at the moment.

OFFICIAL DISCOGRAPHY

God Damn Religion DVD, (30 minutes, 2008, Locust Music)
Earth/Sir Richard Bishop – Split 12” (2008, Southern Lord)
Polytheistic Fragments (2007, Drag City)
While My Guitar Violently Bleeds (2007, Locust Music)
Elektronika Demonika (2006, Locust Music)
Fingering the Devil (2006, Southern Records)
Improvika (2004, Locust Music)
Salvador Kali (1998, Revenant Records)

SELECTED REVIEWS:

POLYTHEISTIC FRAGMENTS

“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, 2007)

WHILE MY GUITAR VIOLENTLY BLEEDS

"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 (Dusted Magazine).

FINGERING THE DEVIL

“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)

IMPROVIKA

“ 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)

SALVADOR KALI

“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)