SIR RICHARD BISHOP

SIR RICHARD BISHOP is renowned for his mercurial guitar-playing for 26 years with Seattle ethno-delic legends Sun City Girls, but he has wrought a distinguished solo canon as well. He combines soulfulness and advanced technique with a panache that’s nearly unrivalled among today’s guitarists. Bishop strums spiritual with incantatory ragas, free-folk excursions, crystalline flamenco flourishes, ruddy Appalachian folk, Middle Eastern-tinged fantasias and gypsy arabesques. This is eclecticism done with respect and third-eye-dilating filigree; his compositions attain a sepia-toned wistfulness and a psychedelic complexity.

Bishop’s first solo record, Salvador Kali, was released by John Fahey’s esteemed Revenant Records label in 1998. Locust Music issued his second record, Improvika (2004), which consisted of nine extemporaneous pieces for solo acoustic guitar. More recently Tangier Sessions, was released by Drag City in 2015. It consists of a series of improvisations recorded in Tangier, Morocco in 2014 using a 19th century parlour guitar of mysterious origin. Bishop's latest album, Oneiric Formulary, was released by Drag City in 2020, whilst a new LP called Hillbilly Ragas will be released this September.

https://sirrichardbishop.com/

C JOYNES has ploughed a singular furrow through solo guitar over the last decade, with a body of work incorporating English folk-tunes alongside North & West African music, and lifting proto-minimalist and improvised techniques from the European classical and avant-garde traditions. Joynes has released 10 albums to date, including ‘Poor Boy On The Wire’ (2021), his first solo album dedicated wholly to the electric guitar; ‘The Borametz Tree’ (2019), recorded with long-term fellow travellers Dead Rat Orchestra; and ‘The Wild Wild Berry’, a collaboration with singer Stephanie Hladowski. He has recorded a number of sessions for BBC Radio 3. He has also played extensively across the UK, Europe and the USA, sharing bills with a broad range of performers including Shirley Collins, Martin Carthy, Marc Ribot, Richard Dawson, Alasdair Roberts, Jack Rose, Josephine Foster, Six Organs Of Admittance and 75 Dollar Bill.
 
Shifting away from the electric guitar of his most recent solo activities, Joynes is currently exploring the uses of an amplified archtop guitar, exploiting the instrument’s potential by placing intricate parlour music alongside overdriven garage blues throw-downs and the brittle ringing tones of free improvisation.

http://cjoynes.bandcamp.com/