Drag City: Five years after Tangier Sessions, Sir Richard Bishop, we presume, is back from his travels around the world. With Oneiric Formulary, he’s dug deeper into his bag of extra-musical gestures from the eternal and unknowable, along with a few sounds we might recognize, all transmuted for our mortal ears’ enjoyment. The last couple of Sir Richard Bishop releases on Drag City were genre exercises of sorts—The Freak of Araby explored the musical legacy of late Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid while Tangier Sessions explored the sound of an obscure 19th-century guitar that Rick had acquired from a mysterious Swiss luthier.
The title Oneiric Formulary, may sit contrarily on the tongue—but we may refer to it as representing “a collection of dream states”—which means we like it! With such a lofty goal in mind and at his fingertips, Sir Rick returns to the approach of his DC debut, Polytheistic Fragments—a different sound, a different instrument, for nearly every track, drawing from the music of all nations, including and especially that infamous republic with only one person on the census roll (initials SRB). It’s got mad variety, the kind you don’t see much of anymore—an Ed Sullivan kind of evening out, with some spinning plates, dancing mice, and of course, an appearance from Zippy the Chimp.
What it means is that when you drop the needle/raise the laser/press the head to tape/ or do whatever happens when you stream it, you’ve got sounds that don’t sound at first like guitars—because they’re not! Then you’ve got sounds that sound initially like guitars—because they are! Sir Richard found joy in not only finding unlikely sounds, but also writing a fake jingle, soundtracking an unreleased film, reflecting on Southern origins, going concrète (Beatles-style!), using computers (Sir Rick, no!), and accidentally juxtaposing Frippian electric guitar drone against the grit of ol’ school acoustic guitar while thinking of sci-fi, as well as revisiting (t)rusty old forms such as Americana, classical, gypsy and raga. It’s all trotted out to phantasmic effect, as it brings to us with the freshness, the roar of the old crowd as they see, smell and hear the greatest show on earth. What a night! Thank you, Sir Richard Bishop.
Taken from his new album, listen to Mit’s Linctus Codeine Company on which he also shares the backstory:
Sir Richard Bishop on the backstory to Mit’s Linctus Codeine Co.
On my many visits to India over the years, I always found it necessary to visit the local chemists/pharmacies in order to have on hand any medications that may come in handy while traveling. These ranged from pain killers, muscle relaxers, cough medicine, pills for stomach issues, etc. – all necessary for traveling in India, and much cheaper compared to similar products in the west. I noticed that it was the cough medicine that I was using more than anything else (though the pain killers were a worthy contender). For years my go-to brand of cough ‘medicine’ was Glycodin cough syrup which was my favorite. It had a pretty high content of codeine and it ‘did the trick’. But, during my last visit, I learned, much to my disappointment, that Glycodin had at some point since my previous visit, removed all the codeine from their once loved product (probably not a good business move). This led me on a search for other options.
After hunting around for a substitute for Glycodin with no satisfying results, I eventually found one chemist in Varanasi who had this syrup which went by the name of “Mit’s Linctus Codeine Company”. I figured since it had the word Codeine in the name it must still have Codeine in the bottle. I also really liked the odd name. So I bought one bottle in order to check it out. I was thrilled to learn that yes indeed, there was a high amount of Codeine present and it seemed to work wonders for my, ahem, ‘cough’. So I went back to the same chemist and bought a few bottles just to have on hand, I mean, you never know when your ‘cough’ is going to act up again. I smoke a lot so I have to be prepared. At some point I began reading the paper insert which came with every bottle. It was here that I became familiar with both the benefits and the warnings about using this product. This is what gave me the idea of creating a fake jingle for this, my new favorite cough syrup company. It seemed natural to me for the music to be a little bouncy and somewhat happy sounding, mainly because I was thrilled when I discovered its virtues. It did put me in a good mood whenever I used this medicine. I came up with the basic chord progression then and there, in my tiny little guest house room overlooking the Ganges river, and recorded a simple acoustic version of it in order to document it. I also wrote out a couple of drafts of text to be used as a voice-over, some of which I pulled from the insert which came with the bottle.
Months later when I returned back home I re-recorded the music with an electric guitar and added some jazzy little embellishments as overdubs and pretty much left it at that. One draft of the voice-over text was eventually published within an Indian travelogue article I did for Bixobal Magazine, Issue #1, but I had never put the voice-over and the music together. The music itself seemed to be fine on its own and a remastered version of that is what is on the new record. Just for fun, I took the best lines of both voice-over parts and added it to the music, just to see how it all would work out. It pretty much resulted in exactly how I envisioned the jingle from the very start.
Oneiric Formulary released 17 April via Drag City
Pre-Order: https://www.dragcity.com/products/oneiric-formulary
Photo Credit: Alan Bishop