Sir Richard Bishop - Fingering the Devil (Latitudes CD) & Plays the Sun City Girls (No-Fi 7")

You and I both know Sir Richard Bishop from the Sun City Girls, but he sure has been making a name for himself in solo flights, particularly this year. By my count he's already self-released "Vault" volumes one through three and "All Strung Out", in addition to these two. Not to mention he had a hand in the two new Sun City Girls records that came out this year, and we've only just hit the halfway point of the year! It's hard to keep a good man down, they say, and Sir Richard is definitely a good man. I first came across his solo playing on Locust Music's "Wooden Guitar" compilation (alongside contemporary acoustic adherers Jack Rose, Steffen Basho-Junghans and Tetuzi Akiyama). I was actually surprised at how well Bishop could wrangle a guitar. Not to say that the Sun City Girls aren't virtuosos in their own rights...but I just never woulda thunk it. Maybe I was expecting something weirder and more tongue-in-cheek ala brother Alan Bishop's Alvarius B and Uncle Jim projects. But nope, Richard plays it rather straight, even when he's covering his own band's tunes as seen on the 7".
"Fingering the Devil" (I'm not entirely sure what to think of the name) starts off blazingly with "Abydos", a brief Spanish-flavored steel-string speedster. The 7-minute "Dream of the Lotus Eaters" follows that up, and it's every bit as dreamy as the title would hint at, and Richard lets the track expand and fill up the silence on its own terms, blossoming into a delicate little sonic flower. "Romany Trail" is slightly quicker, and Richard's fingers dance around the strings quick as a whistle, but nothing too savage. "Anatolia" is bursting around the seams with a flamenco flair, bringing back around the pace of the first number. When I go on a journey across dirt paths with my hobo stick resting on my shoulder, I want this song playing in the background (and preferably an over-top camera so I appear just a bit bigger than a dot on a massive landscape - you know?). The title track is content to ravel and unravel fibres of steel symphonics...Bishop plays fast but the track is still at a slowed pace, and the dichtonomy is quite something.
This album is CD-only, but if it wasn't, "Spanish Bastard" would definitely kick off side two. It's very similar to the album-opening "Abydos" - an astonishingly quick early Fahey-style face-slapper. You can almost hear Bishop's skin getting caught on the strings and tearing before he pulls them away on into the next melody. "Gypsum" works similarily, another quick one (in length and in the way it's played). I wouldn't have any trouble believing that there were two guitarists on this one, but there ain't and that's the facts. Two longer tracks close out the album, the first being "Black Eyed Blue". Coming in at 8 minutes it starts off with morose, repeated refrains but Bishop starts changing it up soon enough, switching styles like a record being played at alternating speeds. It's both poppy but sinister, cheery but foreboding, and it ends with another raucous digit-slicer. But it's peanuts compared to the 14-minute "Howrah Station", where Richard seems hell-bent on blowing all the competition out of the water with his blindly fast fingers and sounds. First the hyperspeed ragas come out in blurts, then all at once as Bishop dives into the conclusion. It sounds like the most frenzied, cymbal-crashing/guitar-smashing closer to a prog-rock odyssey, but then you snap out of it and realize it's just one guy with an acoustic guitar and he's improvising. Really, what more can I say?
The "Plays the Sun City Girls" 7" is pretty straight forward, as SRB tackles two SCG cuts culled from a July 24, 2005 date in Newcastle. The tracks are culled from the Girls' classic "Torch of the Mystics", with the A-side being the intro to "Space Prophet Dogon" coupled with "The Vinegar Stroke" (despite being just labelled "Space Prophet Dogon" on the record), and it's not entirely unlike the album counterparts only Rick gets a bit more furious with them...especially on the B-side's version of "Esoterica of Abyssynia", which wails on all different kinds of levels. Holy shit do his fingers fly on this one. It sounds almost like white noise spilling out of the speaker but every now and then there's a twonk of the original riff to keep you anchored. It's great, but just as a side dish.
The 7" is still available through various distros, but it's limited to 500 and awfully cheap so it probably won't be around forever. The Latitudes CD, unfortunately, seems to be sold out entirely (it did come out way back in March or April though). In fact I think the only readily-available Bishop albums are "Improvika" on Locust Music and the much-lauded "Salvador Kali" on Revenant. I'm sure someday in the future all these limited editions will be cobbled together on a collection, but until then we'll just have to twiddle are thumbs in anticipation...