Arcane Candy

Since 1979, Sir Richard Bishop has proven himself to be one of the hardest-working, multi-talented entertainers since Sammy Davis Jr. From 1981 to 2007, he tickled the public’s fancy with his guitar playing and singing for the Sun City Girls, an outfit that could veer from rock to jazz to free improv to hillbilly to avant-garde to performance art at the drop of a wooden nickel. Over the years, in addition to working as a seller of esoteric books, Rick has been helping his brother Alan, who played bass and sang in SCG, record and film myriad raw music performances from around the world for CD, LP and DVD releases on their Sublime Frequencies label, which was founded in 2003. Since 2005, Rick has also been touring far and wide to take his masterful solo acoustic guitar playing to the masses.

And now, as if all that weren’t enough, Richard Bishop adds filmmaking to his ever-growing pile of talent with his first solo motion picture, God Damn Religion. At the beginning of this rapid-fire collage of “demonic and divine imagery,” Rick steps inside the gaping mouth of a huge, menacing stone face, where he is quickly swallowed down into the hopeless darkness of the Gastro-Intestinal Tract of Evil. There, he encounters a dizzying array of sex and violence depicted in art throughout history and around the world. Highlights include some downright malevolent-looking women painted on a panel van, a phallic garden featuring a bunch of huge cocks festooned with scarves, endless scenes of torture, the murderous Hindu goddess Kali, the torment of Jesus Christ, some good ol’ down-home Chinese fornication, and much more. Luckily, Rick somehow manages to climb back out at the end.

One of the most memorable segments is an ancient-looking black and white Swedish movie from 1922 called Haxan, which features scenes of general chaos and devil torture ritual that unfurl at hypersonic speed. Here, and throughout God Damn Religion, Rick shows off his penchant for assembling dimly-lit electronic musicscapes, which range from jaunty Munsters-like themes to gurgling ambience to some seriously heavy slam doom of uncertain origins. In fact, some of these sounds originate from Rick’s Elektronika Demonika LP from 2006, which is included here as a bonus CD. As a whole, this two-disc set offers a fascinating glance at the scare tactics foisted upon humanity down through the ages by the powers that be. 666 thumbs up.

Label: Locust Catalog Number: L107 Format: DVD / CD Packaging: Jewel case Total Time: DVD 31:29, CD 39:33 Country: United States Released: 2008 More: Amazon, Discogs, Forced Exposure, Official, YouTube

Text ©2009 Arcane Candy

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