Strange brews

Sun City Girls and Sun Ra's Arkestra

The Sun City Girls formed in Phoenix, a few miles away from a suburb called Sun City (though they live in Seattle these days), and none of them is a girl -- which just shows how hard it is to take anything the band say at face value. Charlie Gocher and brothers Alan and Rick Bishop, for all of whom the word "multi-instrumentalist" is a gross understatement, have been playing together for 18 years or so. They are just about the most uneven outfit on the planet: their best albums are brilliantly imaginative, their worst are unlistenable, and it's impossible to describe them in a way that doesn't belie at least half their work.

The great joy and frustration of the SCGs is that you never know what to expect. Torch of the Mystics (Tupelo, 1990), generally acknowledged as their career high point, reconstructs the indigenous music of cultures that don't actually exist and filters it through stinging acid-rock instrumentation; 1986's Midnight Cowboys from Ipanema (Amarillo), generally acknowledged as the low point, is a haphazard collection of sneering covers of '70s soft-rock hits where someone appears to be messing with the tape speed. The Girls' oeuvre also includes 20-minute drones, a surreal spoken-word comedy single, psychedelic gamelan music, obscene protest songs, rabid free improvisation, an album where they impersonate hobos muttering around a fire, serious jazz composition, a 78 of bouncy Asian film-music covers, and collaborations with the Velvet Underground's Maureen Tucker, bizarro-bluegrass guitarist Eugene Chadbourne, skatecore lunkheads JFA, and violinist/composer Eyvind Kang. And that doesn't take in the members' solo work.

For the last half-decade, the SCGs have favored putting themselves into uncomfortable or unfamiliar situations, recording the results, and salvaging the good parts. But until recently, this usually prolific group hadn't released anything since Box of Chameleons, a three-disc, 128-track, career-spanning retrospective of unreleased scraps that came out in 1997 on their own Abduction label. Now they've returned with Carnival Folklore Resurrection, the umbrella title for a new series of CDs on Abduction. The first installment, the somewhat disappointing Cameo Demons and Their Manifestations, appeared a few months ago: it's mostly extended, clumsy percussion jams accompanied by faint speaking-in-tongues babble, tremulous horns, and a little noise from a piano that's seen better days. In places, it brings to mind a field recording of some kind of ritual for the dead. Only the closing track -- the ultra-lo-fi Ornette Coleman/santeria pastiche "Lunar Gun-Point Recollections" -- has the energy and coherence of the SCGs' best work.

Just out, the second installment, The Dreamy Draw, opens with a shambling bit of graveyard theme music for piano, Indonesian percussion, and drums and goes on over the course of its first half to traverse the same general territory as Cameo Demons, but with a darker, sourer tone. The album's centerpiece is the title track, a 21-minute free workout on gamelan that begins with intoxicated, near-random bashing and gradually works up to a demonic-possession trance state. The band don't know how to play the gamelan properly, and they aren't trying to; they make it serve their purpose anyway. Then there's "Rotation Flotation," which finds one Girl still groping around the gamelan set; it's augmented with a sinister little piano theme and a slow harmonium line that purrs like a resting tiger. The album's a mess for sure, but it's never boring. The sound quality suggests that somebody accidentally pressed a boombox's "record" button, and the playing is halting and uneven, but the band have a trickster's intuition for what should happen next. They've strayed far from the beaten path, so they're slashing themselves a new one.

The closest antecedent to what the Girls are up to these days comes from an unexpected place: Sun Ra's weirdest CD, Strange Strings, which since its 1967 release had been out of print until it was reissued recently (on Thoth). The great avant-jazz bandleader Ra gave members of his group electronically amplified stringed instruments that they'd never played before and a big piece of sheet metal, told them to go to it, and recorded the results for 40 minutes. Rock-solid bassist Ronnie Boykins attempts to hold things together; mostly, though, the album is the sound of a howling plunge into the unknown. Ra's Astro Infinity Arkestra members are lost, but they're all lost together, trying to clear space for one another and find their collective way to something that sounds meaningful and gripping. They don't have a theme to reach for, or even specific notes to rely on, and the bizarre amplification makes everything sound gaudy and coppery. So, like the Sun City Girls 30 years later, they rely solely on instinct, letting the instruments guide them, like Zen archers firing into the sun that blinds them.

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