Pirate Radio
Listening to the Sun City Girls this evening. The trio of mystical music mayhem-eers live in Seattle and have been the subject of two recent profiles (one in The Wire's February 2004 issue and last week's Seattle Weekly [that article is archived here]). I'm late to the party and snapped up one of the last copies of Carnival Folklore Resurrection Radio today and Solomon and I have been listening to it tonight. It's a smash-up of avant-jazz, field recordings, regional cassette tape music, wild-eyed preacherman poetry, shortwave transmissions, and fragmentary radio signals. It is like tapping in to a radio station from someplace very distant and very different than where you are right now.
Their home page has a statement of identity written by Tom Vague (of Vague Magazine). It's too good not to share.
"SUN CITY GIRLS are not really a 'Band' but more of a factory of ideas; musical, artistic, philosophical and beyond. They are the epitome of DIY, having recorded, toured, traveled, researched, and hustled for over two decades creating an archive of music, film, writing, Art, etc., with their own financial and associate resources. Because of their fearless approach, bizarre performances, and trickster reputation, there are many legends spread about them: some TRUE, some half-true, some false, yet many of their more 'extreme resumé entries' will probably remain, for the most part, unknown. Every mystery revealed about them seems to create even more mystery. There is a strange energy surrounding them and an honesty about their presentation which separates (and isolates) them from the entertainment industry. They are THEIR OWN entertainment industry, entertaining themselves. And, as one of their song titles suggests, Sun City Girls are 'Without Compare'."
It's got me thinking about late night transmission, late night creativity, and how this hour always sparks with me as sixty minutes of high creative energy. There's something about the sounds of the city at just before midnight, the heaviness of the air and the movement of the winds. The rain always sounds different at sixty clicks to midnight, and the drift of the shadows suggests intelligence or, at the very least, malevolent thirst.
I get up too early in the morning for this hour. I'm supposed to be in bed right now, resting up for tomorrow. I never make it under the sheets in time. I'm always drawn by the whispers of eleven o'clock. If I had a worldband shortwave radio, this would be the hour I disappear to go visit the mutterings of the ether.