Alan Bishop

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• Alan Bishop
• Harry Smith
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If there is any justice in the world, Seattle's own Alan Bishop will go down in music history as a catalyst on par with Alan Lomax and Harry Smith. Since the early ‘00s, the former Sun City Girl has been releasing audio travel-collages of raw global jams on his Sublime Frequencies imprint. As SW writer Justin F. Farrar suggested, Sublime Frequencies is the anti-Putamayo, for Bishop (and business partner Hisham Mayet) is out to prove that even musicians in the most undeveloped countries have heard Hendrix…and copped his riffs. Bishop, as any Sun City fan knows, is a hell of a musician himself, one that puts shame to nearly every musician dabbling in genres bearing such identifiers as "freaky" or "weird.” Whereas his brother—the absurdly talented guitarist Sir Richard Bishop—has mastered multiple musical languages, Alan absorbs the idioms and invents his own. SCG's allure was that it was always shrouded in mystery—a sadly absent element among most bands these days (thanks, Interweb!) But Alan has kept the torch of mystique aflame with pseudonymous solo albums, such as Superstars of Greenwich Meantime under his cranky spoken-word badass alias Uncle Jim, and Abduction, his alien-folk-drifter classic as Alvarius B. I know I could easily make a phone call and find out what Alan is planning on playing tonight. Instead, I say fuck it. In the spirit of all that is truly underground, how about we all just show up and, well, expect the unexpected.
Fri., Jan. 30, 10 p.m., 2009