Nomad Codes

twenty-seven years before Alan got it at a Folklife Festival auction. A red devil mask leers from above.
    I am barely over the threshold of this strange place when I catch the title of a burned CD-R sitting on Alan’s desk: Broken Hearted Dragonf lies . The man immediately starts telling me about these fat Burmese insects whose chests routinely explode. Alan’s wife, who is Burmese and “from another planet,” says they are called broken-hearted dragonflies, and Alan has written the phrase onto a friend’s recording of Thai insect squalls whose intense electronic tones, I soon learn, vibrate with an almost nauseating menace. “Maybe I’ll put it out,” Alan says, as he finally turns the volume down. “But I probably couldn’t move more than 500 copies.”
    Alan wears a backwards baseball cap tugged tightly over a close-cropped skull that accentuates his thin elfish ears. He is hefty and slightly wall-eyed, and has the somewhat disconcerting habit of not always looking at you as he speaks. He’s not the cagey hipster I expected. With his amusing, smart-ass patter, he comes off like a friendly hustler who wants to sell you an eighteenth-century kilim or tell you where the best ping-pong shows in Bangkok can be found. I’m not surprised to learn that for twelve years, Alan worked for one of the largest ticket brokers in the world, a business he compares to The Sopranos without the violence.
    Alan’s restless energy and immense drive lies behind the manic productivity of the Sun City Girls, who have left a huge and serpentine trail of recordings in their wake. Scott Colburn’s online discography lists fifty full-length releases, and Alan estimates that only a couple of hundred people have heard more than half of their hydra-headed catalog. And they like it this way. In the early ’90s, when stalwart ’80s outsiders like Sonic Youth or the Butthole Surfers were cashing in on the capitalinfused expansion of indie rock, the Girls quit Majora, founded their own Abduction label, and continued releasing 1000-copy runs of LPs and CDs that went out of print more or less quickly and more or less stayed that way. Believe me, you don’t need to collect them all. And you couldn’t do it if you tried.
    “We have the luxury of a huge backlog of recordings,” explains Alan, who is an obsessive archivist. “Why press 5000 copies of one record and sit on 3500 when you can run five different projects that sell out? It’s just basic business. Don’t put your money into boxes in the closet.” This strategy has certainly led to lots of self-indulgent crap, but the Girls’ hyperactive catalog is of a piece with the band’s overarching improvisatory ethos. “ We make hard decisions and we make ’em quickly and we move on,” says Alan. “The downside of that approach is that there is too much for people to digest. The upside is that it’s fearless. We don’t sit around and analyze the fact that we’re releasing this or that. So we leave a few diamonds by the roadside and we leave a few heaps of pterodactyl shit as well. Its like a big wagon with sparklers and fireworks going off with a trail of dust behind it.”
    Alan’s gig as a legal ticket scalper helped the Girls maintain the curiously profane purity of their sub-commercial style. “It was never our intention to ever make much money as a band, even from day one,” he says. “We made a pact: If we ever wind up on MTV we gotta shoot ourselves.” But in the summer of 2003, Alan quit his day job to devote himself full-time to SCG and related projects. “I work every day,” he says. “I’m relentless. I want to do as much as I can in five or ten years before I get fed up with the bullshit that this society puts out and relocate to a place that’s less predictable and ridiculous.”
    There is plenty on his plate the day I visit. Hisham Mayet, a friend and cohort who goes by the handle Frank Sumatra, has just gotten back from Libya with 12 hours of footage taken at the Ghadames music festival. Mayet also snagged a box of North African 45s from his family’s basement in Tripoli, and these discs need to be combed through, the nuggets burned onto CD-R and added to the archive, where they may become fodder for a future Girls tune or a release on their new label, Sublime Frequencies, which is devoted to releasing CDs and DVDs of unusual international music and culture. The first batch of releases includes three CDs of music captured during the band’s 1989