Sir Richard Bishop is best known as one-third of experimental rockers and tape-trading cult legends Sun City Girls. Over the course of their two-decade career, that band took just about every musical style imaginable and incorporated it into their own brand of shambling weirdness, stopping only this year, after drummer Charles Gocher died of cancer.
The good Sir continues on his own, and his new album is a dark and visceral approach to solo guitar. Bishop is a guitarist of phenomenal control and deftness: no matter how complex the phrasing or how fast the tempo, he can go from great delicacy to bloody-fingered power and do it with a dancer's grace.
The album opens with "Zurvan," a swift and blurry gypsy-styled finger-picking rush, before moving on to "Smashana," a Keiji Haino-esque feedback meditation on a cosmic scale, a nebulous whirlwind of hums and drones that spirals outward like a galaxy expanding. The 25-minute closer, "Mahavidya," is an intense raga workout that begins with peaceable sitar drones and minimal fretwork, before gaining momentum and snowballing into a frantic acoustic devotional. It’s all sublime in the truest sense.
