Just before Christmas, I heard word of a supergroup of sorts, Rangda, featuring Sir Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny, along with Chris Corsano on drums. Rangda are named after a Balinese goddess, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, which makes sense given some of the esoteric concerns Bishop investigated during his long stretch in the Sun City Girls.
Obviously I’ve written about these three a fair bit over the years: Bishop here; Chasny and Six Organs, here, and elsewhere; and Corsano as part of Corsano/Flower Duo here. Judging by the couple of teasers on the Rangda Myspace, the trio seem to be having some fun with pretty heavy jams that edge towards a kind of fierce-soloing rock orthodoxy, after a fashion. “Bull Lore” is awesome – is that Bishop on lead, I think? “Excerpts In Order To Tease” is just that: the first snippet seems to showcase Corsano at his most frantic and octopoid, and briefly suggests – to me at least – a hook-up between Lightning Bolt and Dick Dale.
This all reminds me, too, that Sir Richard Bishop is honouring Club Uncut with an appearance on March 1, where I guess he’ll be mining his “Freak Of Araby”/Omar Korshid-style thing as well as, allegedly, some old Sun City Girls tracks. Should be a great night – it’s not often we get to see Bishop in the UK. But anyhow: venue is the Borderline in London, tickets are £9, available at See Tickets. See you there, hopefully.
One more thing today. Following the awful news of Jack Rose’s death last month, it seems that “Luck In The Valley” is still coming out as scheduled on Thrill Jockey in February: I’ve just finished a longish piece about it for the next issue of the magazine. In the meantime, however, Ethan Miller has just posted a wonderful boot of Rose playing live, solo, in Virginia last summer, on his great Silver Currant blog. One more glimpse, really, of what a wonderful player we’ve lost.