Nomad Codes

lash from a Javanese heavy. They could even see where the dude was coming from.
    So every night the three young men would wait for what they called “the call of the wild”: the distant madcap clang-clang-clang-clang that would lead them through the crowded city to the Kuda Kepang crew. After two weeks of this, they had almost become part of the family, with Charlie banging out percussion as Alan fed lightbulbs to the kids, their mouths a repulsive mass of lacerations and kerosene burns. You could say a sort of transmission occurred. Alan describes it simply as “the best show ever.”
    A month and half later, the Girls were on a boat, heading through the Strait of Malacca on their way to the Sumatran city of Medan. With nothing better to do, the trio asked the boat’s lounge act to hand over their electric instruments for a set. The band ripped through what one might call a “typical” Sun City Girls set: “House of the Rising Sun,”“Esta Susan En Casa?” from Horse Cock Phepner , and a sun-baked skronkjam peppered with abrupt stops and starts. The Indonesian audience clapped at the beginning of every song, and then clapped again at the end. Like nearly all Girls performances, this one was recorded, and Rick reports that at one point on the tape you can hear a patron lean over to his companion and proclaim: “Ah, this is American jazz!”
    Purists might have trouble with this description, although SCG are more than capable of pounding out Duke Ellington and Paul Bley tunes. But if jazz means a deep commitment to improvisation, and if improvisation means having the guts to force the hand of chance, then Sun City Girls are most certainly jazz.
    They are most certainly not purists. Sun City Girls traffic with bizarre miscegenations, self-indulgent trash, and hardcore mystic exotica. Their sometimes garish album covers attack the eye with devils, yonis, sacred transvestites, and nubile native jailbait. Lyrics, song, and album titles—”Naga Smoke Signals,” “The Genghis Necro-Nama-Khan,” 330,003 Crossdressers from Beyond the Rig Veda —can sound like the spontaneous verse of young poètes maudits tanked up on National Geographic cheesecake and A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural . This lurid romance with the Other fuels some of their most incandescent sounds as well, a music of transport that explores Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, and South American atmospheres with a passion composed equally of informed pleasure and the heedless appropriation of the strange. Looking high and low, far and wide, the Sun City Girls have sought the wellsprings of the weird, of what H.P. Lovecraft called outsideness , and when they have found them, they have taken what they wanted. On that boat in Indonesia, they got to give some of it back.

    Sun City Girls released the first of their countless recordings in 1984, and since that time they have become probably the most prodigious, uncompromising and caustically esoteric band in the American post-punk underground. Musical chameleons, they have performed tantric space jams, out jazz, riff rock, Sumatran pop covers, spaghetti-western soundtracks, and haunted folk songs worthy of Harry Smith. But they started out simply jamming, back in that trailer park in Tempe, Arizona, their three instruments creating a whirlwind of noise that Alan compares to a nuclear explosion.
    “It was like we discovered this switch,” he says.“ Without really playing together very long we were listening and improvising and hitting synchronicities that we didn’t even think were possible. Within a twenty minute piece, we were stopping on dimes, not even looking at each other, fifteen times. Rick and I would hit eight or nine straight notes, the exact same notes, with Charlie accenting them. How the fuck is that done?”
    According to Forced Exposure ’s Byron Coley, Sun City Girls were “the first truly crazy band to emerge from the shards of hardcore. At first they seemed almost like a goofus prank being played by post-core stoners, but by the time that Torch of the Mystics was released, they were absolutely amazing and obviously pure of heart.” When Majora released Torch in 1990, Coley helped spread the news, and the album’s astral cabaret of voodoo folk jams and dark ethno-psychedelic rites remains the band’s most celebrated release. According to Coley, Sun City Girls laid the foundation for today’s new American sub-underground. “Without these french-fried,