Sir Richard Bishop

As a founding member of the Sun City Girls, experimental guitarist Richard Bishop was established as a cult icon for two decades before issuing his first solo album, Salvador Kali, on John Fahey’s Revenant label in 1998. With it Bishop displayed his penchant for absorbing and incorporating stylistic approaches from all around the world into his music, which continued with more rawness on his next two releases, Improvika (2004) and Fingering the Devil (2006), due to each album being entirely improvised. Bishop returned to more structured compositions with his fourth release and after the death of Sun City Girls’ percussionist Charles Gocher in 2007, his solo work became his primary focus. Bishop signed with Drag City and released Polytheistic Fragments in the fall of 2007 and followed it with The Freak of Araby in 2009.