Oakland's own Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is a brilliant collective of unique minds that lives in a universe all its own. Born from the ashes of Idiot Flesh (click "Idiot" for download link to their first album, "Flesh" for their second), SGM produces a dissonant, well-orchestrated racket using a combination of guitar, bass, drums, vocals, violin, kitchen utensils, and array of homemade instruments, bearing names like the Thing, the Log, the Sledgehammer Dulcimer, and the Popping Turtle.
Named after a Dadaist/Futurist movement from 1916 known as the Sleepytime Gorilla Press, SGM is the nucleus of a large group of related acts, including The Tin Hat Trio, Charming Hostess, Faun Fables, Skeleton Key, Thinking Plague, Vacuum Tree Head, and MOE!KESTRA! (formed by former SGM found-object percussionist Moe! Staiano). Their music is truly unclassifiable, but for a small sampling, check out the video at the bottom of this post. If you've never been exposed to the weird world of the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, here's their first two studio albums, from 2001 and 2004. Be careful.-GRAND OPENING AND CLOSING (2001)
Download HERE
-OF NATURAL HISTORY (2004)
Download HERE
Video for "Helpless Corpses Enactment", from their 2007 album In Glorious Times:
Saw them in Atlanta May or June of 2007. Possibly the most amazing show I have ever witnessed. They sounded to me like the 'Larks' Tongues in Aspic'-line up of KC, transported into the present, informed by equal doses of doom metal and black comedy.
ReplyDeleteThe Book of Knots is in that collective also, I think.