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Bright Surroundings, Dark Beginnings:
NNCK and Sun City Girls
Live at the Coral Room, NYC, 4/13/04

Will Weikart

Yes, Virginia, there is an outside—at least musically. It may be shifting, though, as we are now being granted something of an unveiling, a demystification.

Witness: two of the major forces in contemporary paranormal sound production shared a bill at midtown Manhattan’s Coral Room on a soggy, dank Tuesday night in April. NYC shadow lurkers No Neck Blues Band (NNCK) and the touring Sun City Girls (now hailing from Seattle) are progenitors of a tradition of aural mysticism and esoterica that traverses but exceeds such historical legacies as free jazz, psychedelic rock, folk and the so-called avant-garde.

The Coral Room’s live mermaids, who swim in giant tanks behind the bar, were not on hand this night—which was probably for the best because what transpired would have left them longing for a mere morsel of attention. A packed house, unanimously bearded, stood prepared to be dumbfounded. Savvy (non)patrons avoided the utter crime of four-dollar Rheingolds and instead covertly sipped smuggled-in whiskey.

It makes little sense to attempt to refer to a NNCK or SCG “sound” although each is vaguely distinct and recognizable. While there may be certain unifying aesthetic traits—the deliberate obfuscation of identity on many if not all levels being just one, but perhaps the most salient—each performance, indeed each album, is a unique and irreducible moment. At its best, this “sound” achieves something beyond words. It is this non-place, this nether-land of sound and reference, which give each its uncanny force. Both rely to varying extents on an ethic of improvisation, which implies an ethic of listening, ego-submersion and close attention. But each also avoids the old “high seriousness” of so much avant-art and music production.

Openers NNCK have been playing frustratingly low-key shows (although recently in better-known venues) throughout NYC for probably ten years now, and they’ve toured in the US and Europe. The now seven member unit typically utilizes a daunting barrage of instrumentation (most of them are multi-instrumental) often including, but not limited to: upright bass, alto sax, voices, melodica, acoustic and electric stringed instruments, synths/keyboards, thumb piano (mbira), various electronics, a plethora of percussion and random small noisemakers and debris – sometimes playing something like a tree branch. Moreover, “traditional” instruments are often subverted and played “wrongly” or “badly,” adding to a rather disorienting jumble of signification/performance/spectacle. NNCK at times approach their instruments like aliens who have never touched or seen a musical instrument, much less taken any sort of formal training or lessons. It’s like they’ve un-learned (if they ever knew). As a result, they are often subjected to the same dismissive criticism aimed at much “modern” art: “My five-year-old could do that!”

NNCK shows usually featured one or two long improvised pieces, ranging from quiet, minimalist, drones, gypsy jams—to loud, maximalist wooliness and cacophony, flying cymbals and howling. Part of the mystery lies in this atavistic approach, which somehow yields a musical product that almost always ultimately, inexplicably seems to “work.” I’m consistently amazed at how such disparate elements can emerge, sounding awkward or even terribly out of place, but are inevitably woven into a greater, buzzing tapestry of ecstatic sound. Importantly, these elements simultaneously retain their autonomy.

This show was no exception. Every NNCK show is unique and exploratory. There are no “songs.” Each performance has something new, and the highlights this time included a giant, stage-wide contraption built out of sticks joined by strings, which suspended bells and metals. This contraption produced a clangy percussive sound like that of a wind chime or demented gamelan. But it was used only sparingly and strategically, an ethic of restraint that allows a potentially indulgent form of music to work.

* * *

The Sun City Girls, a trio that formed over twenty years ago in Arizona, is notoriously elusive and has toured rarely for a band so prolific. They have released innumerable recordings and videos, many of which are self-released and/or out of print. Half-Lebanese brothers Alan and Rick Bishop play bass and guitar, respectively, and Charlie Gocher Jr. plays drums. But all three, again, are multi-instrumental and astonishingly talented in ability. They are competent at range of traditional and/or “exotic” instruments, including the gamelan, a traditional Indonesian gong. Much like the clichéd sentiment that free jazz players are unskilled and have no real musical abilities, the Girls seem to always be saying, quite convincingly, “we could do that but we choose not to.” Instead, they dance irreverent circles around the restrictive confines of genre, while somehow and simultaneously paying homage to them.
Which genres, you ask? The tip of the iceberg includes a repertoire intimately familiar with Middle Eastern, Latin American, and South Asian music. Within these traditions, the Girls cover terrain as disparate as pop, classical and folk.

The Girls also play scary ecstatic free-noise; cover classic rock songs and sultry soul tunes; summon the spirits of lounge and surf — and sometimes all at once. For these reasons, SCG shows are legendary and the subject of rumor, humor, fear, contempt and utter bewilderment. The trio has been known to play entire sets in masks and/or full costume; to provoke audiences; to enter into highly conceptual and/or absurdist modes; to sing in “gibberish” and/or hybrid tongues; and to fall into trance-like ritual states. They claim and seem to succeed in channeling spirits, forces, demons and the like. On this particular evening, for example, the rambling, whiskey-swigging Uncle Jim “appeared.”

They didn’t pull out all the stops at the Coral Room but you never know what to expect at an SGC show and they always keep their audience guessing. Their musical arsenal is so huge as to almost preclude repetition. Their new website and a barrage of newly available SCG artifacts mark another notable, partial demystification process at work. The Bishop brothers’ new multimedia imprint Sublime Frequencies documents their physical travels through field recordings and short wave radio collage, and offers insights into the smorgasbord of cultures and sounds. All of this only begins to explain the enigmatic conglomerate that is SCG.

It is arguable that, at their best, both groups approach the ideal of the deterritorialized refrain. NNCK’s sound requires that we un-learn the proscribed ways of hearing, beginning with the entrenched and reified “song.” It is a journey into the unconscious, into sound for sound’s sake, and I can’t necessarily make a convincing case as to why one should embark on it; this is a personal decision. But there is security in letting go and the rewards are plenty. This is the music of willful obscurity and it is often content to go nowhere, even if today it is gaining marginal attention.

Will Weikart is a student in the PhD program in Sociology.