Sun City Girls

The uncategorizable career of Sun City Girls, virtuosic musicians as well as master tricksters, came to an end earlier this year with the untimely passing of drummer Charles Gocher. But the trio recorded an awful lot in its 25 years, and since much was released only on vinyl or cassette, a reissuing raid on the band’s vaults could last till CDs themselves are obsolete.

The key to Sun City Girls is that they were always on; undoubtedly there are less-than-essential pieces in their catalog, but even a drunken recording destined for a cassette pressing of four would be blessed with their unique dark magic. Piasa…Devourer of Men, a purported soundtrack from 1993, is still waiting for an ostensibly nonfictional Italian director to complete the film. But it’s hard to think of anyone with the budget to make a visual analog to this cohesive, panethnic romp. Through much of Piasa, it’s as if we’re spying on rituals we were never meant to observe; this may be because Sun City Girls had an intuitive way of blending together traditional sounds from around the world while conjuring fake ones on the fly. Mostly improvised, Piasa is united by a powerful logic distinct to this band.

Dulce—also a fake soundtrack with a fantastical backstory—is more forbidding (a relative term with this group). While the 1998 album seems less a whole, that allows for more individual brilliance to come through, as with Rick Bishop’s spaghetti-Easternisms on the title track. Dulce is another vital piece of Sun City Girls’ multifarious puzzle.

—Mike Wolf