Friday, June 29, 2007

You requested sun city girls - midnight cowboys from ipanema


An eclectic mix of every musical style one can think of -- demented surf, Indian and Asian improvisation, free-form noise, fractured folk, you name it -- with doses of kabuki theater, shadow puppetry, and maverick guerilla stagecraft thrown in, the avant-everything Sun City Girls are a fiercely independent and experimental trio whose only credo seems to be to continually stretch boundaries while remaining amazingly inclusive, a process that has led to a dizzying array of vinyl, cassette, and CD releases in the past 20 years. Even though it was issued on cassette, you could call this Sun City Girl's third album. Mutant cover songs alternate with what Scott Colburn calls "what happens when two boys get ahold of a portable cassette recorder with weak batteries."

Sue P. Fox - Light Matches, Spark Lives


SUE P. Fox has a distinctive voice. Or distinctive voices. Her speaking voice is a weary drawl occasionally brightened by amusement. Her performing voice shifts from robotic blankness to lisping feyness to childish mispronunciation to "normal" first-person tones: essentially, it shifts from character to character. It's propelled by her writing voice, which runs through tunnels of memory and mazes of present-day anxiety, occasionally crashing into a locked door marked "The Future." Fox's performing voice and writing voice run on and on until a song ends. But when the song ends, closure is usually nowhere in sight.