Alan Bishop has long been championed as a founding third of one of the underground’s greatest founts of experimental genre flexibility and unpredictability, Sun City Girls, which he formed with his brother Richard and the late Charles Goucher. The newest transmission from Bishop under the moniker Alvarius B. is Malarial Dream, which is available on LP April 24 through the Abduction label. Recorded in Cairo, where Bishop has resided for 15 years, the set’s scope is expansive, offering rich Middle Eastern excursions and vivid psychedelic vistas. Numerous worthy contributors take part in a satisfying dive into the unexpected.
Alan Bishop released his first album as Alvarius B. over 30 years ago, and at that point, he’d already been on the scene for more than a decade. Sun City Girls was the main course in his discographical banquet, but Bishop also recorded with Eddy Detroit, Velvet Underground drummer Maureen Tucker (in the band Paris 1942), and guitarist Eugene Chadbourne.
In the 1990s, when it would’ve been easy or at least possible for Bishop, either solo or as part of Sun City Girls, to navigate upward and negotiate a record deal with a major label, he wisely kept it subterranean as the output continued to flow forth. Along with running Abduction and co-founding the incalculably valuable Sublime Frequencies label, he’s participated in a range of projects, including The Dwarfs of East Agouza and The Invisible Hands.
Dwarfs of East Agouza members Maurice Louca and Sam Shalabi, and Invisible Hands participants Adham Zidan, Aya Hemeda, Cherif El Masri, and Morgan Mikkelsen guest on Malarial Dream alongside Amelie Legrand, Asher Gamedze, Eyvind Kang, Hana Al Bayaty, Huda Asfour, and Sammy Sayed.
The sounds Bishop harnesses with various lineups of participants on Malarial Dream are robust and edgy as fresh possibilities are honed from a variety of blended traditions. Opener “Rock N’ Roll” combines swirling, swaying string thickness with psych-rock propulsion. The next track, “The Multiple Hallucinations of an Assassin (Pt 2),” combines a steadily building rhythmic foundation with vibrant drones, persistent flourishes of plucked strings, and the eventual entrance of voices to form a decidedly Middle Eastern tableau.
The title track, complete with Bishop’s vocals, grandly sweeping and beautifully bent, is a considerably bolder journey into psych-folk’s outer regions, fully blasted but still legitimately spiritual. There’s no fakery or approximating going on across this LP as “Later” undertakes a slow glide into deeper psychedelic geography. When the drums kick in, it’s almost imaginable that the labyrinthine trail has led to the outskirts of some mysterious ballroom.
“Texas Headphones” opens side two and effectively picks up where “Later” left off. There’s a rekindling of energies as a fresh intensity catches fire and then an abrupt vanishing of activity. From there, “One Month Non-Sexual Vacation In Mongolia” is a more tranquil, if no less psychedelic a progression, and then “Mako” bends back toward rock but with a hazy regality. “Rooftop Blue Cameo” is a short jaunt of repetition, slightly off-kilter but also sturdy.
For the finale, “Unfinished Business” gradually tightens its bedrock velocity and seasons it with cascades of strings. It’s yet another fine showing for Alan Bishop, loose and warm but with a lack of unnecessary ballyhoo. The man just gathers a band and then gets deep inside his and their thing, a tried and true experience in extremely fucked times.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
