#alan bishop

[garadinervi]

The Dwarfs Of East Agouza, Sasquatch Landslide, (180g LP – Limited edition of 500, CD, Digital album), CST187, Constellation, 2025

Sam Shalabi: electric guitar Maurice Louca: keyboards, beats, electronics Alan Bishop: alto saxophone, acoustic guitar, vocals

All tracks by The Dwarfs of East Agouza Recorded by Nene Baratto at Big Snuff Studio in Berlin Mixed by Jace Lasek at Break Glass in Montreal Mastered by Harris Newman at Grey Market Mastering

Artwork: Mark Sullo Design: Ian Ilavsky

(via «Battiti» dal vivo – Jazz Is Dead 2025: Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, «Battiti», Rai Radio 3, May 18, 2026)

[dustedmagazine]

Alvarius B — Malarial Dreams (Abduction)

The first track on Alvarius B’s new LP Malarial Dreams is called “Rock N’ Roll,” and the song has a rollicking, hip-bumping, downhill momentum fit to its moniker. But check the instrumentation. In addition to Alan Bishop’s acoustic guitar and Morgan Mikkelsen’s stripped-down drumkit, you’ll hear Bishop’s frequent collaborator Sam Shelabi on an antic oud and composer Amélie Legrand gamely stroking a cello. The assembled band seems to be operating at some distance from Led Zep, or the Velvets, or Gary Glitter (thank goodness…) or any other rock outfit that has played a reflexive paean to the musical form. One is tempted to follow through on the implications of the accumulated semiotics and suggest that Alvarius B’s song is a sort of malarial dream of rock and roll.

That would be a mistake — or at least it would trap one in the kind of double-bind that Bishop’s long-running band Sun City Girls in part used to specialize in. To assume (or insist) that rock and the “exotic” fall into intrinsically separate musical categories is a Western chauvinism, of a piece with the music industry’s attempts to collapse all the tunes and sounds issuing from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific islands into a single “genre” called “world music” (or “global folk,” as Spotify suggests). Those cynical formulations are less malarial dream and more nauseating nightmare. Sun City Girls never tired of provoking such chauvinisms, and then flipping them the bird. The band offered the same response to the liberal hand-wringers who pronounced them “cultural appropriators” or agents of neocoloniality.

Sun City Girls expressed their idiosyncratic interest in the musical traditions of the Arab nations (as we seem to be calling them) from the jump — see “Helwa Shak” from their debut LP in 1984 or “Kal el Lazi Kad Ham” from the sublime Grotto of Miracles (1986). And the Bishop brothers’ relationship to the music goes farther back. They have spoken to early experiences at their Lebanese grandfather’s house, listening to him play the oud and jam with his pals, some of them outlaw Michigan Freemasons who rejected the Christianized version of the secret society and maintained their own meetings and esoteric metaphysics.

40 years later, it's true that Malarial Dreams is a less metaphysical, outré experience than Grotto of Miracles or, more recently, some of Bishop’s other releases as Alvarius B; interested parties might consult the excellent Baroque Primativa or the feral Fuck You and the Horse You Rode in on. Some of the new record’s finest songs are its gentlest. “One Month Non-sexual Vacation in Mongolia” features Shelabi and Cherif El-Masri exchanging moody, melodic passages on oud and electric guitar. It’s a fairly pent-up, tense affair, but it’s also lovely. “Later” is down-tempo and meditative, slowly adding layers of shimmer (Adham Zidan and Maurice Louca play dueling organs) and, in its second half, Asher Gamedze’s expressive drumming.

Among Malarial Dreams’ nine songs, “The Multiple Hallucinations of an Assassin — Part 2” might be most immediately engaged with the musical textures and tones Bishop hears in Cairo, where he has lived for some time. Huda Asfour plays a qanun, in anxious, evocative conversation with Bishop’s guitar. “Part 1” of the composition appeared on Sun City Girls’ Bright Surroundings Dark Beginnings (1993), one of the band’s records for Majora. That earlier song is an example of the Girls in grim and then resonant improv mode. “Part 2” expands and refines the melody, brightening the corners but not losing the sense of foreboding. It’s Alvarius B in a reflective mood, considering the places he’s been. This reviewer is grateful that he’s still willing to take us along, into the strange spaces he’s currently creating.

Jonathan Shaw

[jt1674]

Visit Original Link

[ozkar-krapo]

PARIS 1942

"Paris 1942"

(2LP. Superior Viaduct. 2025 / rec. 1982) [US]

[bandcampsnoop]

8/30/25.

This release will undoubtedly be something that both Micah and I talk about. Micah has worshipped at the altar of the Sun City Girls since I've known him. I've been smitten by Moe Tucker for about as long.

Paris 1942 actually gives us the answer to the question, what happens when you put the Bishop brothers in Moe Tucker's living room in Phoenix, Arizona in the early 1980s? Come on, you know that question has been on your mind for quite some time. Guitarist Jesse Srogoncik rounded out the group. They apparently practiced prodigiously and played 4 shows. The liner notes for the 2 LP describe the music as providing "a missing link between the Velvets and the Voidoids, between the Dead Boys and the Dead C, between ESP-Disk' (Ed Askew) and DNA."

Richard Bishop compiled this 2 LP behemoth and another LP worth of covers and oddballs (including two Velvet Underground songs and a killer cover of The Modern Lovers' "She Cracked").

Thanks to Superior Viaduct for releasing this. It fully releases on Halloween.

[harmonycorrupted]

Sun City Girls - The Shining Path (Torch of the Mystics, 1990)

Based on the Bolivian folk song “Llorando se fue”, recorded by Los Kjarkas in 1981

[musicanywhere]

Sun City Girls - Cooking With Satan

[avantpanda]

Sun City Girls: Live at the Sky Church - September 3rd, 2004 LP