Sir Richard Bishop

Sir Richard Bishop ranks among the globe's boldest guitarists, weaving techniques and idioms from every continent into an ambitious style that continues to shift and expand. As a founding member of the avant-rock icons Sun City Girls, he has stood as a central figure in experimental music since the 1980s. Together with that ensemble he issued dozens of recordings whose genre leaps proved impossible to predict and whose core often rested on improvisation. Solo guitar work first surfaced from Bishop in 1998 with Salvador Kali on John Fahey's Revenant imprint, yet his output grew markedly more abundant in the mid-2000s, especially once Sun City Girls concluded after drummer Charles Gocher's death in 2007. Several widely praised albums have since appeared on Drag City and Locust Music, among them Polytheistic Fragments (2007) and Tangier Sessions (2015). He has also joined drummer Chris Corsano and guitarist Ben Chasny in the improvisational power trio Rangda.

Born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1960, Richard Bishop learned guitar without formal instruction during his youth. In 1979 he and his brother Alan Bishop relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, where they established Sun City Girls alongside percussionist Charles Gocher in 1981. Over the following two-and-a-half decades the group recorded and toured without pause, producing countless cassettes, LPs, and singles. Their lyrics frequently explored occult subjects, while their sound absorbed beatnik spoken-word passages, psychedelic rock, and musical practices from the Middle East, India, Europe, and the Americas. Although many releases took the form of limited cassettes, several full-length albums emerged, the most celebrated being 1990's Torch of the Mystics. Beyond Sun City Girls, Bishop took part in short-lived side projects such as Paris 1942, an early-1980s band that featured Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker.

His solo career opened with 1998's Salvador Kali, released under the name Sir Richard Bishop that remained in use thereafter. That recording revealed Bishop's habit of drawing stylistic approaches from worldwide sources, a practice that persisted with greater immediacy on the fully improvised follow-ups Improvika (2004) and Fingering the Devil (2006). In addition to numerous limited tour-only CD-Rs, he issued the experimental electronic album Elektronika Demonika. While My Guitar Violently Bleeds and Polytheistic Fragments, his first Drag City release, both arrived in 2007 and signaled a return to composed material. After Gocher's passing that year, Bishop's solo projects became his central activity. He supplied the track "Corpuscle," a brooding piece threaded with traditional Spanish motifs, to the 2008 various-artists collection Wooden Guitar, which also featured acoustic contributions from Jack Rose, Steffen Basho-Junghans, and Tetuzi Akiyama. The 2008 DVD God Damn Religion, constructed from occult imagery, was packaged with a CD edition of Elektronika Demonika. Recorded as a tribute to the late Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid, Bishop's 2009 solo album The Freak of Araby appeared next.

Rangda debuted with the 2010 Drag City release False Flag. Bishop's limited solo LP Graviton Polarity Generator followed later that year, and he performed on his brother Alan's (Alvarius B.) Blood Operatives of the Barium Sunset in 2011. Originally a self-released CD-R, Intermezzo received an LP edition from Ideologic Organ in 2012. Also that year came the solo LP The Unrock Tapes and the ritual ambient album Beyond All Defects, a collaboration with composer and sound sculptor W. David Oliphant. Rangda's second album, Formerly Extinct, credited to the power trio of Bishop, guitarist Ben Chasny, and drummer Chris Corsano, appeared on Drag City the same year; a split LP with the Dead C surfaced on Ba Da Bing in 2013. In 2014 Bishop issued split LPs with Bill Orcutt (Road Stories [Kali]) and Alvarius B. (If You Don't Like It, Don't!), together with the solo recording VDSQ Solo Acoustic, Vol. 8.

Issued by Drag City in February 2015, Bishop's Tangier Sessions presented a solo set improvised on a mysterious travel guitar. His affinity for duet recordings resurfaced on Ivory Tower, a collaboration with avant axe slinger Ava Mendoza released by Unrock in early 2016. Rangda's third Drag City album, The Heretic's Bargain, also appeared that year. In 2017 Bishop shared the split EP Strange Fruit with Alvarius B. He reunited with Oliphant for Carte Blanche, a split LP with Karkhana and Nadah El Shazly issued by Unrock in early 2019. Bishop's subsequent solo album, the stylistically varied Oneiric Formulary, arrived on Drag City in 2020.