Between 1985 and 1990, the experimental rock band Sun City Girls, founded in 1979 in Phoenix, Arizona, released a staggering number of tapes on their own Cloaven Cassettes label. These recordings captured passionate improvisations by bassist and saxophonist Alan Bishop, drummer Charlie Gocher, and guitarist-pianist Rick Bishop, expanding the language of rock with adventurous free-jazz nuances. Even during this highly productive phase, their fascination with ethnological sounds was already emerging — a thread Alan Bishop would later pursue more fully through his work with Sublime Frequencies from 2003 onwards.
Now, two tapes from 1989 — Extra-Sensory Defection and Graverobbing in the Future — have been newly remastered and reissued. Across six sprawling trips, the trio crafts an idiosyncratic sound world — one that was already edging into post-rock territory while punk still dominated. The pieces are largely instrumental and free of conventional structures: noisy and punkish one moment, deep in the avant-garde jazz cellar the next, always intuitive, spontaneous, and stylistically unbound. Sudden rhythmic breaks, melodic improvisations, and lo-fi Frank Zappa-esque detours shape the sonic landscape, while occasional vocals evoke shades of beat-poetry-punk or indigenous North American chants.
