Hillbilly Erotica

The solo acoustic guitar was having a moment in 2007. John Fahey was dead, but Jack Rose was alive, deep in an astounding run of records. Tompkins Square had launched its crucial compilation series, Imaginational Anthem, already in its second volume. Potential contributors seemed everywhere—William Tyler, Steve Gunn, James Blackshaw, Ben Chasny, Alexander Turnquist, and Glenn Jones, all of whom would release great records within the next five years. But Sir Richard Bishop always seemed to be in a different world, or at least a different river. A founding member of the inveterate eccentrics Sun City Girls and a rare bookseller who specialized in the occult, the magical, and the mystical, Bishop had a long face and a devilish glint, emphasized by a goatee that sometimes hung far below his chin.

To call Bishop’s playing “American primitive,” a former Fahey mantle many younger players were taking up, would be to see his guitar but not really hear it. His own 2007 album, the aptly titled Polytheistic Fragments, danced between a love of the Beatles and Django Reinhardt, Terry Riley and extended raga erudition. These were the distillations of a listener interested in the entire world, of a listener who would soon swear off guitar music itself. Bishop addresses that distinction on two recent albums—last year’s charged Hillbilly Ragas and this year’s even better Hillbilly Erotica, both attempts to connect with the raw essence of what he considers American primitive by playing with “a sort of reckless abandon … a much more savage approach.” No, it still doesn’t sound like Fahey; it just sounds like Bishop, almost as wild as he’s ever been.

Bishop often courts chaos on these eight songs, seven of which are pure improvisations. His frenetic strums at the start of opener “Lick Skillet” sound like something played by a teenager who loves death metal but whose parents gifted him only a used acoustic, or something John Darnielle would have beaten into his boombox decades ago. But notice the way a low drone hangs throughout these three minutes, oozing out of the guitar’s body, or, more conspicuously, the high rapid-fire high notes Bishop somehow manages to squeeze between the strums. These aren’t surgical overdubs; this is the momentary tandem of experience and precision, the kind of thing that you want to witness in person.

Bishop maintains that sensation for almost six minutes on “Back Forty Lashes,” where he strums so low and hard and picks so high and light that he sounds like the duo of a down-tuned guitarist and an oud master on uppers. These parts of Hillbilly Erotica demand to be played out and let loose, like that teenager who one day hopes to harness the volume of Marshall stacks. Turn it up, and you’ll hear riffs inside of riffs and overtones oozing between the notes, much like the way Meara O’Reilly’s Hocket for Two Voices can sound like a half-dozen singers.

Despite the occasional shock of Sun City Girls or the vinegar of his mission statement here, few guitarists are better at pastorals or serenades than Bishop. Both “Finger, Tennessee” and “Finger Revisited” (named, like several tracks here, for tiny towns close to Bishop’s father’s place just east of Memphis) eventually get busy, but they are first simply gentle and gorgeous, Bishop’s sparkling notes like fireflies on the horizon at dusk or dragonflies darting across the surface of a pond at midday. Only closer “Postcoital Serenade,” the one piece here Bishop didn’t improvise, keeps its cool the entire time, Bishop letting each of its licks begin to fade before he picks up the next one. It is the closest Bishop gets to primitive godhead Fahey, but there is a key distinction: Where Fahey boasted that he could make syncopation sound like death, Bishop makes it sound like relishing life, like sighing through a grin after fucking or running or playing guitar or whatever else it is that erases your mind for a moment. I can imagine the sides of Bishop’s mouth lifting as he tenderly picks this one, the smile pulling up the goatee.

For the first minute of “Bride of Rhythm Methodist,” Bishop attacks his low strings so aggressively that he doesn’t have time to lift his fingers from the neck. The sound his calluses make as they slide against the strings, then, is almost as loud as the notes themselves. When I hear those incidental artifacts, I think about how long Bishop has been at this or, conversely, how many of those other acoustic guitarists from two decades ago have moved toward other sounds and approaches. (The field, thankfully, has diversified at least a little in their wake.) Bishop is like the longtime local who revisits the same plot of land every day, always looking for unexpected ways to see and interpret the familiar. Hillbilly Ragas and Hillbilly Erotica neither reinvent solo acoustic guitar nor how Bishop fits within that world; they do, though, suggest other possibilities, new ways to take the past somewhere that still feels untamed and untrodden, perhaps even primitive.