Sleepytime Gorilla Museum
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is an experimental rock band from America, formed in Oakland, California in 1999 .
Band history
After the band Idiot Flesh broke up, Nils Frykdahl and Dan Rathbun and Carla Kihlstedt from the band Charming Hostess (in which Frykdahl and Rathbun also played) founded the new band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum with the additional members David Shamrock on drums and Moe! Staiano as a percussionist . The first gig, which took place in Oakland on June 22, 1999, was played in front of a single so-called banana snail. The following night the band made their first appearance in front of a human audience. During the recording of the debut album Grand Opening and Closing , drummer David Shamrock left the band and was replaced by Frank Grau. Grau was also the one who donated the first tour and managed the band.
The drummer also left the band while recording the follow-up album Of Natural History . Grau was replaced by the new drummer Matthias Bossi, who previously worked for Skeleton Key. Percussionist Moe! Staiano said goodbye on the following tour, whose place was taken by Michael Mellender. The band signed a recording deal with The End Records in January 2006. The label re-released their debut album Grand Opening and Closing and added 3 additional tracks.
Shortly afterwards it was announced that a new album was in the works. This was published in May 2007 and is called In Glorious Times . An MP3 and a music video were already available before the release.
On February 15, 2011, the band announced that they would split up after completing their fourth studio album, The Last Human Being , as well as a short film under the same title and a live DVD.
Surname
According to interviews and the very detailed liner notes of the first album, the name "Sleepytime Gorilla Museum" originally came from a small group of Dadaists , futurists and artists who called themselves Sleepytime Gorilla Press and who owned a facility at the beginning of the 20th century described themselves as the “museum of the future”, which was “non-historical”.
That museum opened on June 22, 1916 (and therefore on the same date as the band's first concert, 83 years later). The exhibition corresponded to a fire that caused great chaos and confusion among attentive people. The following day the museum was closed again (as the name of the debut album alludes to). The museum's name apparently comes from a poem called "Of the Future Hides the Past", which was written by museum members Lala Rolo and Ikk Ygg.
style
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's music can be roughly described as avant-garde rock, avant- prog, or avant-garde metal. However, the music cannot be classified strictly, so that you usually have to name different bands so that you can get a rough idea. Often in this context u. a. Mr. Bungle , Thinking Plague , King Crimson and Univers Zéro mentioned .
Puppet shows, pseudo-scientific presentations and appearances by members of the Butoh group inkBoat are often incorporated into the live shows at Sleepytime Gorilla Museum .
The band invents and builds many instruments themselves. Dan Rathbun, who constructs most of the idiosyncratic instruments, plays the so-called slide piano log, which consists of a single piano string and is over 2 meters long. You play it with two batons: the one in your left hand is used to tie the fret, and the other is used to strike the string to create the tone.
Percussionist Michael Mellender's instruments consist of kitchen utensils, garbage can lids and other metal objects that he finds and that he uses to complement traditional percussion instruments. One of the more popular instruments the band used was Moe! Staiano's “Popping Turtle” (this can be heard in the song “Sleep is Wrong” from around 1:21).
Discography
- Grand Opening and Closing (Album, 2001)
- Live (Live-CD, 2003)
- Of Natural History (album, 2004)
- The Face (Live DVD, 2005)
- Grand Opening and Closing (Re-release, 2006)
- In Glorious Times (album, 2007)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ facebook.com: The Future Imperfect , accessed April 2, 2011