Music Preview: Sir Richard Bishop is the Freak of Araby

Sir Richard Bishop has been challenging listeners to follow him on a fascinating, diabolical, and occasionally hilarious journey for nearly thirty years. First as the guitarist with experimental pranksters Sun City Girls, then through his early involvement with the superlative Sublime Frequencies label, Bishop has synthesized his wide-ranging influences, including esoteric mysticism and the occult, Hinduism, and Django Reinhardt through field recordings, solo performances, and outright psychedelic freakouts.

Since the untimely dissolution of Sun City Girls in 2007, Bishop’s flown solo, stunning audiences into hypnotic reveries with his preternatural virtuosity and melting pot compositions for acoustic guitar. His current tour for new LP The Freak of Araby departs from this norm, as it’s the first since his days with the Sun City Girls to feature accompanying musicians. The album itself is a bit of a departure: as you may have inferred from the title, it’s inspired by traditional North African music (and nods specifically to Omar Khorshid, “The King of Arabic Guitar”), as well as Bishop’s Lebanese roots. On the record, he ignores the acoustic guitar entirely in favor of the electric, forgoing extended solos and instead taking a more direct and rhythmic approach to simpler but no less engaging variations on eastern modal scales.

Tonight, Bishop will draw almost exclusively from The Freak of Araby, and it will be interesting to see if he’s able to practice the restraint the material calls for in a live setting. A group of musicians as prone to improvisation as Bishop, openers Oaxacan also act as his backing band on this tour. While their nearly uncategorizable free rock seems diametrically opposed to the nature of the music on The Freak of Araby, this sort of intuitive contradiction usually makes for a fascinating live experience. Needless to say, we eagerly await tonight’s gig at the Mohawk.

Sir Richard Bishop [Official] [MySpace] [Freak of Araby Vintage YouTube channel]
Oaxacan [Myspace]
Many Birthdays [Official] [Myspace]