Sleepytime Gorilla Museum are scheduling a series of Grand Reopening tours, recordings, and related events. In early 2024 after a 13-year hibernation, they re-emerged with a 5-week tour. They have now added two new California shows at The Lodge Room in Los Angeles January 24th, and UC Theatre in Berkeley January 25th. Keep reading for more information.
Get Los Angeles and Berkeley tickets here: https://linktr.ee/sleepytime_gorilla_museum
The Sleepytime Gorilla Museum opened its doors to the public in 1916, only to show them a well-managed fire. Its doors were closed shortly thereafter and remained so for the rest of the century. Almost. The last year of the 20th century found the improbable trio of words once again adorning a placard posted outside a derelict urban building, with the addendum – “No Humans Allowed.” Indeed, the frenzied re-opening was witnessed by a lone banana slug (Ariolimax dolichophallus) from Joaquin Miller Park. The fine print announced that humans would be allowed the next night. And so, the next dozen years of music and entertainments would cater largely to human beings and their entourage of “hangers-on.”
Formed in 1999 in Oakland CA by musicians that had played together in Idiot Flesh, Charming Hostess, and Acid Rain: David Shamrock, Carla Kihlstedt, Dan Rathbun, and Nils Frykdahl, who were agreed that percussion-tornado Moe! Staiano would sharpen up the attack. They carried on the message of Rock Against Rock – more a form of behavior than a true set of principles or a music genre- inspired by the hard-to-put-down work of the original Museum: Futurist Lala Rolo, and Black-Mathematician John Kane.
The release of their debut album, Grand Opening and Closing (2001), which opens with “Sleep is Wrong,” a song they would play a little differently at every show for the next decade, initiated years of incessant touring, spearheaded by new drummer/manager Frank Grau, who benefited from coffee. In driving their large green bus through the vast uninhabited lands of North America, they became besotted with the places between: dry, green, inhuman, perfect. And so their second album, of Natural History (2004), was staged as a debate: the Futurists, with their 1909 celebration of speed and the noise of the machine, versus the Unabomber, a math professor who said “the human race with technology is like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine.” Frank played his last tour entirely in a donkey-head mask, before announcing his departure for a career in professional sports gambling, and Matthias Bossi came in to finish the album and join the band after being rescued by the green bus with his then-group Skeleton Key, who had crashed! Moe! left later that year, to be replaced by Michael “Iago” Mellender, who seems to play all instruments.
This line-up, still intact, released In Glorious Times in 2007, which opens with an invitation to trouble: “All the desperate people in this town are coming out tonight…They’ll be here soon.” This record, as all of their records, features the troubling and comical art of Per “Ward C. Picnic” Frykdahl, whose earthly struggles with an affable derangement had come to an end, but who left us with the injection to “spend more time possesed (sic.).”
For years before and during Sleepytime, its members had scurried and squawked as part of Ink Boat, a Butoh-dance troupe led by Shinichi Momo Koga. Their “Cockroach” piece lent its title song to the Natural History album, and Shinichi next joined SGM on tour, caged, poked and displayed as the “Last Human Being,” who, on more than one occasion “escaped” by walking across the sea of the audience. This led to recording part of an album and shooting a short film (directed by Max Baloian), greatly expanding on the stage show.
At the close of this decade of fecundity, many children arrived to swell the ranks of the already burgeoning Sleepytime family, and the group became awkwardly bi-coastal. At risk of becoming a “greatest hits” version of themselves, they announced a final series of shows in 2011, with the amicable intention of finishing the album and film. Life in its rich variety, lack of funds, a crashed hard drive, and a global pandemic made work on these projects sporadic. Rabbit Rabbit Radio, Faun Fables, Free Salamander Exhibit and the Immersion Composition Society kept the band members off (or on) the streets for a dozen years. But the very ubiquity of cyber-technology, lambasted in “The Gift” on the new album, has made possible this finishing of album and film, spearheaded by the crowd-funding virtuosity of Meredith Yayanos and Mallory McAvoy, with Nick and Anya Ohler‘s new label Avant Night set to release the record with a U.S. tour in the spring of 2024.
“Writhing in the old bliss Never forget this
Reeling in the sweet grip Never let this slip
Your eyes are yours to close Never let go Sleep is Wrong”
of the Last Human Being tracklisting:
01 Salamander In Two Worlds
02 Fanfare for the Last Human Being
03 El Evil
04 Bells for Kith and Kin
05 Silverfish
06 S.P.Q.R.
07 We Must Know More
08 The Gift
09 Hush, Hush
10 Save It!
11 Burn Into Light
12 Old Grey Heron
13 Rose-Colored Song
Most of these recordings were started at Polymorph in Oakland, CA in 2010-11. Additional overdubs in the intervening years were done at Polymorph and in home studios across the land. S.P.Q.R. was entirely recorded and mixed at Polymorph in 2004 (previously released as a 7” on Dephine Knormal Musik). “Hush, Hush” and “El Evil” were recorded at Polymorph and home studios in 2023.
Members:
Meredith Yayanos – Special Ambassador, Ordained Symposiarch Of The John Kane Society
Mallory McAvoy – Diplomatic Liaison, Bailiff Of The Guild Of Bards
Erik Carter (an uncle) – Futurist Coordinator
John Karr – Audial Conveyist And Evidence Hoarder
Scott Crowley – Moving Picture Husbandry and Conservation
Jenya Chernoff – Head Of Propaganda and Graphic Design
Gregory Scharpen – Imagist, Disinformationist
Nicholas Ohler – Patron Saint of Fucked-Up Music
Karl Hofstetter – Locked Groove Stasis Enabler
Robert S. Meitus – Disentanglementalist
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