#alan bishop

Sam Shalabi: electric guitar Maurice Louca: keyboards, beats, electronics Alan Bishop: alto saxophone, acoustic guitar, vocals

All tracks by The Dwarfs of East Agouza Recorded by Nene Baratto at Big Snuff Studio in Berlin Mixed by Jace Lasek at Break Glass in Montreal Mastered by Harris Newman at Grey Market Mastering

Artwork: Mark Sullo Design: Ian Ilavsky

That would be a mistake — or at least it would trap one in the kind of double-bind that Bishop’s long-running band Sun City Girls in part used to specialize in. To assume (or insist) that rock and the “exotic” fall into intrinsically separate musical categories is a Western chauvinism, of a piece with the music industry’s attempts to collapse all the tunes and sounds issuing from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific islands into a single “genre” called “world music” (or “global folk,” as Spotify suggests). Those cynical formulations are less malarial dream and more nauseating nightmare. Sun City Girls never tired of provoking such chauvinisms, and then flipping them the bird. The band offered the same response to the liberal hand-wringers who pronounced them “cultural appropriators” or agents of neocoloniality.

Sun City Girls expressed their idiosyncratic interest in the musical traditions of the Arab nations (as we seem to be calling them) from the jump — see “Helwa Shak” from their debut LP in 1984 or “Kal el Lazi Kad Ham” from the sublime Grotto of Miracles (1986). And the Bishop brothers’ relationship to the music goes farther back. They have spoken to early experiences at their Lebanese grandfather’s house, listening to him play the oud and jam with his pals, some of them outlaw Michigan Freemasons who rejected the Christianized version of the secret society and maintained their own meetings and esoteric metaphysics.

40 years later, it's true that Malarial Dreams is a less metaphysical, outré experience than Grotto of Miracles or, more recently, some of Bishop’s other releases as Alvarius B; interested parties might consult the excellent Baroque Primativa or the feral Fuck You and the Horse You Rode in on. Some of the new record’s finest songs are its gentlest. “One Month Non-sexual Vacation in Mongolia” features Shelabi and Cherif El-Masri exchanging moody, melodic passages on oud and electric guitar. It’s a fairly pent-up, tense affair, but it’s also lovely. “Later” is down-tempo and meditative, slowly adding layers of shimmer (Adham Zidan and Maurice Louca play dueling organs) and, in its second half, Asher Gamedze’s expressive drumming.

Among Malarial Dreams’ nine songs, “The Multiple Hallucinations of an Assassin — Part 2” might be most immediately engaged with the musical textures and tones Bishop hears in Cairo, where he has lived for some time. Huda Asfour plays a qanun, in anxious, evocative conversation with Bishop’s guitar. “Part 1” of the composition appeared on Sun City Girls’ Bright Surroundings Dark Beginnings (1993), one of the band’s records for Majora. That earlier song is an example of the Girls in grim and then resonant improv mode. “Part 2” expands and refines the melody, brightening the corners but not losing the sense of foreboding. It’s Alvarius B in a reflective mood, considering the places he’s been. This reviewer is grateful that he’s still willing to take us along, into the strange spaces he’s currently creating.