Intermezzo parades this variety in its myriad forms. Bishop has always been a capable purveyor of the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink “genre” as exemplified in Sun City Girls’ many albums. We recognize strains as disparate as Spaghetti Western soundtrack, flamenco, long-form epic, Southern-fried folk, and delay-laden shambolic noise. If you need your dose of transcendental acoustic glory, you’ll find it on “Inner Redoubt.” If you’re looking for a front porch stomp with a little bit of Spanish flavor, check “Hump Tulip.” Want a dusky raga with a tense mood? The next track “Dhumavati” will provide. Those who see the solo guitar as reaching its limits must be turning deaf ear towards Sir Richard.
The puzzling thing about this work is not the differences in its tracks, but the title. Each of these pieces can stand on their own merit, and none of them feel like an interlude between the two songs that surround them. There seem to be two options here: either Intermezzo is a threshold between Bishop’s other works, or each of these pieces stands on its own as a bridge between experiences, connecting what came before it with what comes after (...) Intermezzo displays Bishop in top form, and if this is an interlude, the next act should be spectacular.
tiny mix tapes
Listen through Sir Richard Bishop's six readily available solo albums, and you get the picture that the worldview of the former Sun City Girls’ guitarist is not only complex, but also more than a little ambiguous. What exactly is Richard Bishop? A dealer in the exotic? A dabbler in esoteric mysticism? A “traveling salesman”? The Freak of Araby doesn’t make Bishop’s worldview any simpler for us, but it does clarify it some. He is, first and foremost, a traveler, picking up inspiration as he roams, but he is also a worshiper at the altar of the guitar, occasionally himself transforming into a guitar hero/idol.
On The Freak of Araby that challenge is the guitar styling of Omar Khorshid, an Egyptian-born guitarist and composer of music for film. After a period of immersion in Khorshid’s music, Bishop recorded a handful of standards from the Arabic world alongside a few from his own pen. Playing exclusively on electric guitar again and with a bare-bones band (bass guitar, drum kit and hand percussion), Bishop does his best to inhabit Khorshid’s spirit, eschewing any extended soloing in favor of concise variations on simple, sensual themes, some of them Morricone-like in their directness and memorability (...)
Bishop’s interpretations of standards little known in the West are enlightening and his originals a nice complement, but they feel a little dry at times, even flat. One would’ve wished for more of the adventure he shows on pieces like “Taqasim for Omar,” a brilliant solo feature, or the delay-pedal and reverb orgy of “Sidi Mansour,” a piece that reaches for the same psychedelic excess Khorshid could unleash. In this case, a little less tribute and a little more irreverence would have been very welcome.
Sir Richard Bishop prosigue su andadura de fingerpicking aventurero, despojado de ataduras y convencionalismos. The Freak of Araby, se desenvuelve en intrincadas melodías enraizadas en el middle-east. Junto a Rasheed Al-Qahira a la guitarra, Mohammed Bandari y Abdulla Basheem a la percusión y Ahmed Sharif al bajo, Bishop revisiona el folclore egipcio, marroquí y libanés, a Omar Khorshid, a Peter Walker, a Robbie Basho, hay ecos del pasado, terrenos fronterizos, psicodelia. Resulta sorprendente su habilidad para moverse en la tradición y dejar señas de su espirítu insólito y único. El mejor disco del ex-Sun City Girls, atrapado en 'Blood Stained Sands' y la maravillosa 'Solenzara'.
"Bishop creates abstract and dissonant fingerstyle webs that evoke those famous LSD experiments with spiders; and he stretchesout in long raga-influenced improvisations that accelerate into flatpicked furies. " - Acoustic Guitar
This is an essential document by one of America's most original and inventive unaccompanied guitaristsworking today. While My Guitar Violently Bleeds is a splendid three piece gem in which the good Sir branches out & nods to points west, east & otherworldly. Classic spaghetti western tinged spidery fretwork(“Zurvan”), Fushitsusha style feedback drenched psych decay (“Smashana”) and a brilliant lengthy raga epic (“Mahavidya”) round out the proceedings by the Sun City Girls master musician.
Atrapado quedarás en la telaraña de Mahavidya: to finish the album off we are treated to the album's longest piece, the 25 minute epic 'Mahavidya', a haunting raga underpinned with an Eastern drone allowing Bishop to effortlessly fingerpick over the top. Meditative and involving we hear the track build slowly and subtly from sparsely picked out notes to the kind of frenetic strumming and desperately technical playing the man is probably best known for.
