Lo-Fi Splendors From the Third World

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The New York Sun

Since the early 1980s, the Sun City Girls, consisting of bassist Alan Bishop, his guitar-playing brother Richard, and drummer Charlie Gocher, have been one of underground rock’s most mysterious and prolific bands. Appearing in strange masks and costumes in photos, releasing scores of cassettes, LPs, and CDs, blurring the lines between song and improvisation, and never playing the same set twice, the group travels widely but rarely tours – instead they roam the world soaking up the music of different cultures.


This has become increasingly evident in the band’s own music since 1990’s landmark “Torch of the Mystics” LP, which effortlessly fused ethnic sounds with indie rock at its most freeform. Since 2003,the Bishops have been releasing compilations of a variety of world music on their own label, Sublime Frequencies, racking up more than twenty titles that collect exotic radio broadcasts, street music, and obscure studio recordings from Syria, Cambodia, Burma, Nepal, Sumatra, Lhasa, and Morocco, among others.


This fall, the label has three new releases. Because of current events, the most anticipated of the three is “Choubi Choubi! Folk & Pop Sounds from Iraq” (Sublime Frequencies) – which is also the most musically interesting album. The jagged playing on the opening cut, “They Taught Me” by Ja’afar Hassan, sounds like Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band reincarnated as a bar mitzvah band. Dating from the 1970s and termed “socialist folk rock” by the disc’s compiler, Mark Gergis, it contrasts sharply with the rest of the contents, which exemplify various strains of Iraqi folk and pop music – choubi, bezikh, basta, and hecha.


Each song is rhythmically driven, making the styles more analogous to various dance club genres (break, house, gabba, and the like) than anything else, while the instrumentation of double reeds and fiddles will be familiar to listeners of other Middle Eastern music. The rat-a-tat beats of choubi are especially energizing, and M.I.A. fans could do worse than to check out the final track, by Souad Abdullah (whose title is unknown to Gergis). The CD booklet notes that all of the recordings, which are mass-duplicated on cassette as opposed to mass manufactured, are in the public domain, and that the musicians survive by playing weddings, parties, and clubs rather than through record royalties – which is especially interesting in light of the ongoing battles between West ern record companies and file-sharing organizations on the Internet.


Assembled from radio transmissions and live performances in North Korea, “Radio Pyongyang” (Sublime Frequencies) gets off to an arresting start with “Motherland Megamix,” which runs through a sequence of vocal choirs, polka beats, and cowboy-style gallops, narrations, and cheap electronic drum and keyboard sounds at a pace so rapid that even John Zorn might have trouble keeping up. The disc’s subtitle, “Commie Funk and Agit Pop From the Hermit Kingdom,” is a bit misleading; nothing here is particularly funky, and I’ll have to take their word for the propaganda in the lyric content (which is sung in Korean and Chinese). It has a bizarre kitsch value, suggesting a pop karaoke version of Peking Opera, but never lives up to the dizzying promise of the opening cut.


Finally, there’s “Guitars of the Golden Triangle” (Sublime Frequencies), a second volume of “folk and pop music of Myanmar” compiled by Alan Bishop. It presents almost two dozen two to three minute early-1970s pop numbers in decidedly low-fi splendor (taken from what must be umpteenth generation cassette dupes, there are numerous dropouts throughout), which does enhance their overall appeal. The playing is professional (but not slick), the tunes are solid (but forgettable), and the vocals lack personality. Those fascinated by lost-in-translation pop a la J-Pop or the Japanese psych-rock underground may find a kindred charm here, although these efforts are not as world-class as many in those genres.


But as I listened to each track, I kept being reminded of the Sun City Girls’s version of “The Shining Path” from “Torch of the Mystics”; part of Sublime Frequencies’s implied message is that the Seattle-based Bishops speak folk, rock, and pop themselves as a foreign tongue.


The New York Sun

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