The death in 2007 of Charlie Gocher Jr – surrealist, prankster, and drummer with Sun City Girls since their inception –robbed the psychedelic underground of one of its most remarkable, unpredictable groups. In existence since the early 1980s, the Sun City Girls, with a lineup of Gocher, alongside brothers Alan and Rick Bishop, on bass and guitar respectively, released some of the most confounding records you’re ever likely to hear. They’ve a back catalogue of well over 50 albums, cassettes, and singles, and over time their remit has stretched through dazzling free-rock, abstract acoustic improvisations, eerie forgeries of Third World traditional music, surrealist spoken word suites, and spooked requiems that sound like they’ve fallen from old Italian film soundtracks. Their story is a wild one. Forming in Phoenix, Arizona, the trio spent the ’80s largely undercover, releasing a few limited LPs alongside their self-released Cloaven cassette series, playing baffling live shows with hardcore groups, and taking trips to Third World countries, during which they researched local music and occultism, collected instruments, and made field recordings, some of which have turned up via the Bishops’ Sublime Frequencies label. They ‘broke out’ in the ’90s with albums like Bright Surroundings, Dark Beginnings and Torch Of The Mystics, but there was still something hidden about the trio – to know of them was to partake of arcane knowledge. Rick Bishop, a devotee of tantric goddess Kali, also collects and sells esoterica; he now performs snake-charming solo guitar as Sir Richard Bishop, and shares the Rangda trio with Ben Chasny (of Six Organs Of Admittance) and powerhouse percussionist Chris Corsano. Alan Bishop records solo as Alvarius B, and sometimes as his alter ego, the wiseass humorist and storyteller Uncle Jim. All this means your work is cut out for you if you’re entering the weird world of the Sun City Girls for the first time. Their albums, Torch Of The Mystics (1990) and 1996’s mammoth 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda triple-LP set, are among the wildest psychedelic epics of the past 30 years. But beware – tread too far into these murky waters and you’ll encounter the horrific, lounge-chintz covers album Midnight Cowboys From Ipanema, or the stodgy improvisations of Live From The Land Of The Rising Sun. They’re possibly the only group whose triple-CD retrospective, Box Of Chameleons, featured all unreleased material and was at times forbiddingly impenetrable. As Alan Bishop once said to cultural critic Erik Davis: “We leave a few diamonds by the roadside, and we leave a few heaps of pterodactyl shit as well.” Their final album, Funeral Mariachi, has them playing things relatively straight, and it’s definitely one of their ‘diamonds’. Recorded largely before Gocher’s death, and completed by Alan Bishop and long-time producer Scott Colburn, it’s free of the more oblique, scurrilous and downright frustrating sides of their temperament. Funeral Mariachi is luxurious in both recording quality and musicianship – most things are taken at a slow clip, like the opiate-drones and tablas of “This Is My Name”, which blossoms near its end with a lilting melody flourish from guitar. A cover of Ennio Morricone’s “Come Maddalena” touches the same nerve – indeed, the unsettled exotica of the Italian’s scores provides a good reference point for much of what the Sun City Girls are up to here. There is still plenty of weirdness. The album opens with “Ben’s Radio”, which flips through scattered vocal turns and brash, drilling acoustic guitars like a child spinning a short-wave dial, the trio inventing hybrid languages through multi-colour glottal reveries. There’s an almost synaesthetic touch to the psychedelic qualities of Funeral Mariachi, with Alan Bishop’s banshee wail, best heard on “The Imam”, cutting through smoke-rings of reverb. He also resurrects that sound at the start of “Holy Ground”, where a hypnotic, surrealist chant gives way to an almost tender tune for fuzz-tone guitar and old-timey, humming organ. It’s a reminder that the Sun City Girls often peddle in warped, spooked nostalgia. Funeral Mariachi is a great album, torn from the fabric of another time, paying tribute to Gocher and the multi-horned history of the Sun City Girls. Their more unhinged, trickster side, found on 330,003 Crossdressers, could perhaps be more in evidence, but that’s just being picky. This is as riveting and beautiful a valedictory address as you could hope for from these underground heroes. JON DALE Q+A Richard Bishop You’re currently travelling through Syria and Lebanon. Research? Pleasure? We actually just performed two evenings of shows here in Beirut. First night was the two of us together performing Sun City Girls material and the second night we did solo sets. Now that the shows are over I am in full pleasure mode with a little research thrown in. Sun City Girls always had the travel bug. I can hear that musically: what else did you draw from your encounters overseas? In a word: everything. Meeting and talking to the people, watching and sometimes participating in their ceremonial adventures, settling into and studying different aspects of life in foreign lands and realising that most of the time, it is much more intriguing and inspiring than anything from our own country. You and your brother play telepathically. Has your relationship changed much? Nope. We’re as close as ever. I will say Charlie contributed greatly to that idea of telepathy, so that is sorely missed, but the two of us are still capable of getting things done by any means necessary and that includes telepathy if we have to resort to it. INTERVIEW: JON DALE

As pop music develops an ever expanding back catalogue, even the most dedicated music fan needs some help in navigating a way through its myriad vaults. It’s here that the DJ – the talent scout, the tastemaker – becomes more important than ever. We need obsessive crate-diggers who spend their days rummaging through second-hand vinyl shops from Nashville to Addis Ababa, as a pith-helmeted colonialist might hack through jungles in search of valuable minerals. The Amorphous Androgynous, a DJ/producer duo comprising Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans, emerged via a different path to many other crate-diggers. Instead of the usual rare groove/acid jazz route, they started out in the late 1980s as Humanoid and had a big pop-rave hit with “Stakker Humanoid”, before mutating into The Future Sound Of London, a more cerebral, “progressive techno” outfit. Amorphous Androgynous was initially just one of their many DJ monikers, and in 1997 they fronted a two-hour mix on Kiss FM entitled “A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding In Your Mind”. It mixed Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen” with “Silver Apples Of The Moon” by electronica pioneer Morton Subotnick and segued into Jonathan King’s “Everyone’s Gone To The Moon” while slipping in brief quotations from Charles Bukowski reading from one of his own novels. Soon the Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble sessions – in clubs, on radio, record and podcast – started to become a minor phenomenon. Here, 50 years of pop history was rearranged into a fantasy world in which psych-rock nuggets, acid folk, easy listening, world music, prog and primitive electronica are mixed with the odd pop wildcard; knitted together with quotations from assorted psych shamen. Noel Gallagher came across a comp by chance, snapped up dozens of copies and gave them as Christmas presents to friends, including Paul Weller and Kasabian. Gallagher, who invited Amorphous Androgynous to remix “Falling Down” and DJ at Oasis after-shows, claims it forced him to look at pop in a different light; and Cobain says hundreds of fans have said the same. This volume is a typically eclectic and eccentric collection: nearly 50 tracks, linked by between-song narration from Timothy Leary. Cobain’s rather mystical idea that “the past, the present and the future are all with us at once” starts to make sense, as half a century of recorded music is gleefully reshaped. This is a world in which The Moody Blues’ 1968 belter “The Best Way To Travel” invents both Syd Barrett and Blur, and where Donovan gets deeper into spiritual folk-jazz than Nick Drake ever did (“Get Thy Bearings”). It’s a world where “The Beast” by Aphrodite’s Child becomes a terrifying slice of gothic funk, where Steve Winwood and Ennio Morricone become fearsome Hammond jazz gods, and where ragtime pianist Dick Hyman is turned into the godhead of electronica. There are names often dropped by in-the-know hipsters (Linda Perhacs, Amon Düül) and rare groove purists (Rotary Connection, Dorothy Ashby), but Dougans and Cobain also smuggle in recent releases by the likes of Noah Georgeson, Supergrass and Weller. This will lead you up countless new pathways and get you into artists of whom you’ve barely heard (Golden Animals? The Animated Egg? Get in!). Even the most dyed-in-the-wool rock fan with an aversion to the mix-tape will find something compelling here. John Lewis Q+A Garry Cobain of Amorphous Androgynous What’s the distinction between Future Sound Of London and Amorphous Androgynous? At the end of the ’90s, music was quite genre led – indie, dance, ambient – and we’ve always been unhappy with that. We really wanted to break open the experimental door, and that needed a name change. How do you define psychedelia? The word has been around for hundreds of years as a spiritual definition by shamen and anyone looking for transcendental experience. So, for me, part of the ethos has been to reclaim it from the ’60s and drag it into a timeless, genreless, sound dimension, to activate some kind of freedom to experiment. How difficult are these tracks to license? It can take ages. We can play anything we want on our radio broadcasts, but with CDs you have to haggle. With recordings of spiritual leaders, I’ve had to build personal relationships with ashrams in India, or whoever owns the copyright, trying to convince them I wouldn’t be taking the words out of context. We treat these compilations with the same love and care we show our own records! INTERVIEW: JOHN LEWIS