Charles Michael Kittredge Thompson IV, aka Black Francis, aka Frank Black, has a reputation as one tough band leader, whether in the TNT-volatile Pixies of the late ’80s and early ’90s or the hardworking roots rockers known as the Catholics. We’ve seen him seriously tear into a hapless drummer on one occasion, and berate a would-be stage diver on another. We’ve heard the firing-by-fax story. He scares us a little.

Still, his latest musical collaborator, Violet Clarke, cannot be pushed around so easily — she is also his love, his wife, and the mother of his five children. And, indeed, she seems to bring out the best in him, eliciting a playful, relaxed side, not to mention a surprisingly pop-oriented musical style. Together they wrote all the songs, played all the instruments, and recorded all the tracks for Petits Fours, the debut album credited to their joint Grand Duchy project.

First, let us meditate on the strangeness of hearing Frank Black’s inimitable punk roar joined to the early ’90s dark synths and plastic drum machine beats of, say, Depeche Mode. How did the man who spent much of the early 00s cultivating the super organic sounds of Stax and Memphis end up in a new wave project?

Simply, he fell in love with an MTV girl. Violet Clarke says she got her first synthesizer at the age of about six and discovered the all-music-video channel only a couple of years later: “MTV came out when I was eight. Prior to that I would have been listening to the Kinks and the Beatles and classical music. Whatever my mom was listening to. The Who.”

“Ozark Mountain Daredevils,” Black interposes.

“No,” she says calmly. “But when MTV came out, I suddenly was exposed to whatever was happening in 1981. Joe Jackson, the Human League, but also, like Prince.”

But wasn’t Joe Jackson antithetical to what Frank Black ended up doing with the Pixies? Didn’t Frank Black hate the Human League?

“Oh no. I didn’t really hate anything. I went and saw Flock of Seagulls twice,” says Black. “I’ll tell you what I hated — and It would not have been anything from the British/new wave end of things, because that is too much in alliance with punk rock and independent music. Bands like Mass, Winger and Warrant… everything that Spinal Tap is based on. The sort of male-dominated, very… usually American but not always, kind of cock rock, all of that really stupid, dorky kind of pondering that is still as common today as it was then.”

But not the Human League.

Still, wasn’t it hard to combine Clarke’s new wave-y, even dance-y pop with Black’s tendencies toward surrealist, punk-explosive rock?

“I take to heart what Iggy Pop says. ‘It’s all disco.’ And, to a certain extent, it is,” Black explains. “When you think about how classical music, over the decades and centuries has changed… when you think about how much rock and roll has changed in 50 years, and really, you and I perceive all kinds of changes happening all the time. But from another perspective, things haven’t changed that much. We’re talking about a back beat. We’re talking about a three-minute pop song. Verses and choruses. There’s a lot more similarity in all these so-called genres than there are differences, I think.”

Black and Clarke were a couple long before they were a band, though it wasn’t long before Black discovered that Clarke was a musician, too. “I learned that Violet had made a record on her own and began to listen to it, and kind of spent some time, early in our relationship absorbing that,” says Black. “And then, gradually, we would be hanging out together as we were recording in the studio, and she would start to contribute some background vocals spontaneously. That sort of matriculated into doing more extensive work on sessions.”

Their musical partnership gelled when Black was recording Bluefinger, a record inspired by and in tribute to the Dutch musician/artist Herman Brood, who committed suicide in 2001.

“There is an aspect to Herman Brood’s life, which I think Violet was tuned into, and that would have been a feminine side of his life, whether it would have been his true love or one of the girls down at the brothel or girl singers or whatever… there’s kind of a female element, a yin and yang thing to his macho sexiness,” he says. “Violet kind of took on that role. She presented herself as part lover, part background singer, part floozy, whatever it was she was tuned into, to kind of provide this female echo to the Herman Brood thing that I was trying to channel. Anyway, that was our first real collaboration, that she was really tuned into the art that I was making and trying to contribute to it.”

Clarke began contributing regularly to Black’s projects. “You know what, it was really fun… The stuff that I did to contribute on the last few of his records was really, really fun, and then suddenly, it got a little bit trickier when we started writing together,” says Clarke. “Because obviously, there are a lot of new factors like people getting their feelings hurt by a criticism, even if it’s just a helpful criticism. Or just healthy competition. There were new things to traverse. We got through it. And I think it was a really great exercise. Because now when we go into the studio, if one person is a little more dominant that way, the other person kind of steps back. We can modulate our two energies.”

Clarke says that Black had a great deal to do with making the partnership work. “We just had to work through it. And I credit Charles with a lot of the success of the project. It was really him who stepped back, really gracefully, to let my energy in.”

It’s tempting to parse the songs on Petit Fours for clues about the couple’s relationship. In “Lovesick,” for instance, Black repeatedly asks, “What are you wearing?” Later, on “Volcano” Clarke calls someone “muscle bear” (though Black says that “muscle bear” is someone else). Is it weird to put a husband and wife’s personal relationship on disc? Do Black and Clarke ever feel a little too exposed?

Black initially dismisses the idea, saying that his songwriting style has never been confessional enough to cross personal boundaries: “Even when it sounds like I’m doing that, you’ll find out that things don’t always appear to be what they are. What you think is a rock is really a cloud and what you think is a cloud is really a rock.” And regardless, it’s nothing compared to the exposure of playing live: “When you’re singing and you’re playing on stage, you’re already kind of naked. It’s kind of hard to be too embarrassed about anything.”

Clarke ventures that even songs inspired by specific people, relationships and events can expand to become more universal. “For me, also, you can take a specific relationship and you can put it through… you can filter a song through that to get the emotion, but then by the end of it, it can be a universal thing. It can be about a person you never met. Or a person you were in a past life. You can take your current relationship and use it to your advantage, but the end result isn’t necessarily going to be about that. It’s just the feeling propels the process.”

When asked if he and Clarke plan to make more records together, Black asks, “Well, I don’t know. I haven’t been tuned into the music business the last couple of days, does it all still exist? But yeah, we’re making more records. It’s all kind of interesting. The question mark is not so much with the artists, but with all the other aspects of distributing records.” And anyway, he adds, “It’s either that or back to shipping and receiving.”

If you’re in Chicago, Grand Duchy play Wicker Park Fest this weekend; download an MP3 of “Lovesick” via Pop Tarts Suck Toasted.

1. 1982 – Swans

Sonic Youth’s first full-scale tour with an early pre-Jarboe incarnation of Swans.

2. January 19, 1985 in Seattle – Green River

SY meets grunge for the first time, in a show with pre-Mudhoney Mark Arm and Steve Turner. The band later quotes Green River’s “Come on Down” in its (also grunge-referencing) single “Nevermind (What Was it Anyway)”.

3. 1986 – Dinosaur (not even Jr. yet)

The beginning of a beautiful friendship between two of 1980′s loudest, most distorted guitar bands.

4. 1987 – FIREHOSe

Mike Watt joins the band on bass for “Starpower” throughout the tour. Also (probably unintentionally) on vox for “Providence”, with the lines, “Thurston! Watt! Thurston! I think it’s ten thirty, we’re calling from Providence, Rhode Island. Did you find your shit?”

5. September 1987, Dallas Texas – The Flaming Lips

A late show, starting at 2 a.m. Flaming Lips doesn’t even appear on the bill.

6. 1987 – Lunachicks

Kim and Thurston turn up at the noise punk band’s second gig in 1987. By early 1988, Lunachicks were opening the shows where Sonic Youth debuted material from Daydream Nation.

7. 1990 – Nirvana

August 16, 1990 at Las Vegas’ Calamity Jane, Sonic Youth plays its first show with Nirvana; the band has just completed a follow-up to its debut Bleach. With the help of Sonic Youth, Nirvana signs to Geffen at about this time, and releases its number-one selling Nevermind a year later.

8. Late 1992 – Pavement

Sonic Youth acts as midwife to the birth of indie rock, as it takes Pavement on the road in The Pretty Fucking Dirty tour. Pavement brings the slacked out tunes of Slanted and Enchanted to the masses… and introduces SY to its future bass player, Mark Ibold.

9. October 24, 1992 at the Roseland – Boredoms

Japanese noise freakers the Boredoms break from recording sessions with John Zorn to join Sonic Youth for a few shows, including this one in NYC, where P-Wei and J. Mascis join the youth for “Nic Fit” and “No Part II”.

10. 1995 – Bikini Kill

SY’s relationship with the riot grrl pioneers is documented in the band’s punk rocking “Thurston Hearts the Who”, which may or may not be a tribute. (Lyrics like “If Sonic Youth thinks you’re cool does that mean everything/to you?” seem a little snide.)

11. 1998 – The Ex

Sonic Youth played some of its very first shows in Holland with the Ex, then invited them along for the Midwestern leg of its 1998 A Thousand Leaves tour. Later the two bands collaborated on one of Koncurrent’s “In the Fishtank” series.

12. 2000 – Stereolab

Two of rock’s most commercially successful experimenters join forces for US and European shows. NME calls Sonic Youth the winner, stating: “Though the Sonics lack the groove propulsion of Stereolab, their dynamics and spacey, dissonant shrieking are unmatchable…”

13. 2000 – The Gossip

Sonic Youth is sometimes way cooler than its audience. Witness guitarist Brace Pain’s account of his band’s contentious opening slot in this 2004 interview. “There were people there who hated us… And these people were calling Beth a fat ass and yelling at me, ‘Tune your guitar.’” Oy.

14. 2002, 2003 – Liars

I saw one of these shows (with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs opening) at the end of 2003, and it was one of the best live experiences of my life — Liars still in post-punk, apocalyptic funk mode, Angus prowling the stage in rock-star jeans, Aaron hunched over the electronics like a chemistry post-grad student rigging and experiment. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs opened (Karen O and Angus were still an item then), and Sonic Youth closed things out, obliterating some very keen competition with Murray Street fueled psychedelic guitar overload.

15. July 4, 2008 – Feelies

The Feelies’ first string of concerts in decades started at Maxwell’s in New Jersey, but culminated at the lower end of Manhattan on the 4th of July with Sonic Youth. Mercer & co. tried out a couple of new songs, revisited old favorites like “Crazy Rhythms” and “Fa Ce La”, and eased its way into a reconnection with fans after many years of hiatus.

Thanks and kudos to The Sonic Youth Concert Chronology, for its exhaustive list of SY shows and to the SY Live Recording Database for hours of audio recordings.

Known for wistful, understated guitar pop, the Bats will release The Guilty Office in June. A few years older and a bit more experimental, the Clean will unleash Mister Pop this September (it’s their first release of new material since 2001’s Getaway). In anticipation of this sudden surge in Antipodean creativity, we rang up the Bats singer/songwriter and the Clean bassist Robert Scott to talk Flying Nun, fallen stars, and what it’s like to juggle two seminal underground acts.

“It’s really strange, isn’t it?” Scott said of the double whammy. “It’s actually sort of difficult, because we’ve been trying to arrange tours for both bands.”

Scott’s logistical nightmare is music lovers’ unequivocal gain: both stand-out pop albums, The Guilty Office and Mister Pop each subtly update the lo-fi psychedelic sound that defined the country’s late-‘80s era. That signature sound, a blend of jangly pop, psychedelia, punk, and lo-fi pop, began to emerge in Dunedin beginning in the early ‘80s with bands like The Enemy (featuring Tall Dwarf Chris Knox), the Same (who later morphed into the Chills), and an early incarnation of the Clean.

Scott arrived on the scene in 1979 for art school, and, he says, “The first person I met there was David [Kilgour ]. He had just broken up the original line-up of the Clean, and I started playing with him.” Scott was only 20 years old.

In 1982, the Clean went on another hiatus, and Scott formed the Bats with Paul Kean, Malcolm Grant, and Kaye Woodward. They are all still members of the band. He began working with Roger Shepherd of the Flying Nun label around the same time. It was, “very much a cottage industry, with boxes of records stacked everywhere and people delivering packages by bicycle to the post office.”

The Bats, the Clean and Flying Nun all became pivotal elements in the New Zealand renaissance of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. “It was an amazing time to be playing music,” said Scott. “We knew, even at the time, that it was special.”

The Bats flirted briefly with mainstream popularity in the ‘90s, signing to Mammoth in 1991 and touring with Belly and Radiohead in 1993. Asked about the difference between recording with low-key Flying Nun and Mammoth, Scott says, “It wasn’t so different. We did have more money for recording. And every once in a while there were things that would make us say, ‘Well, this is new.’ Like when we had to wear make-up for promotional photography.”

Major labels’ thirst for New Zealanders dried up in the mid-‘90s, but both the Clean and the Bats have continued to make music, albeit at widely spaced intervals. The Guilty Office picks up right where things left off, featuring the same feathery rain of guitar strums shading from major to minor chords, insistent drum and bass, and evocative lyrical lines that have defined the Bats’ earlier albums.

“Like water in your hands/like sugar in your mouth,” sings Scott, in “Like Water In Your Hands.” But if he’s meditating on the transience of life, he is doing so in a remarkably consistent voice. Listen to the music, and it feels like no time at all has passed since Silverbeet or even Daddy’s Highway. Pay attention to the lyrics, though, and you realize that Scott has been thinking hard about the way that years flitter by. “I suppose that the passage of time is something that people think about as they get older,” he said. “I’m not particularly upset about it. I don’t worry about it. But I do observe it, and I like to see how other artists treat it in their work.”

You can hear echoes of these gentle questions in other songs as well: in “Two Lines,” a character is running out of time; in “The Orchard” a speaker talks wistfully of returning to a peaceful place. The Bats’ music has always seemed poised between optimism and melancholy, its bright pop rhythms shot though with sadness. Asked why he thought listeners had so much trouble deciding whether his songs were happy or sad, Scott laughed. “Well, they’re not slow songs, as sad songs often are. They’re more mid-tempo. And the musical part isn’t particularly sad…the guitar and the bass and drums sound like pop,” he said. “But we do use quite a lot of minor chords, which people tend to hear as sad. And the lyrics, maybe.”

Still for a band routinely tagged as subtle, gentle and low-key, the Bats can rock pretty hard, especially live. “People are sometimes surprised when they come to our shows,” said Scott. “They’ll be holding their ears because it’s so loud.”

Scott wrote the new songs mostly within the last year or so, though some, like “Countersign” are older. “Satellites” was inspired on a camping trip to a remote part of New Zealand, where Scott and his family were searching the sky for falling stars, and ended up spotting a satellite. He wrote “The Guilty Office,” which became the title track, in the studio, after fiddling with a chord progression until he made it work. “I’d been playing parts of that chord progression for some time,” he said. “It was difficult to play – a real stretch – so when I finally got it all together, I told the band, you’d better play along now because I may never play it again.” The song, a highlight of the album, is so hard to play that Scott hasn’t yet attempted it live.

Asked about the difference between writing for his two bands, he says that the Clean jams a bit more, and that both he and Kilgour make a conscious effort not to sound overtly like the Bats. “I suppose I’ve had one or two songs on Clean albums that might have worked for the Bats,” says Scott, “but we try to keep the two bands separate.”

It’s unusual to be in one band for more than 20 years – but two? How does Scott manage that? “We’ve taken long breaks with both bands – breaks to have kids, breaks to do other things,” he said. “I think being apart once in a while keeps us together.”

“We’re both really solitary writers. We like to experiment with things by ourselves, to get it to a certain stage, so that we can play it for somebody,” said Parish in a recent phone interview. “But we almost always play things for each other first… We’re always curious what the other thinks, because we use each other very much as sounding boards for our own work.”

The relationship started in the mid-1980s when Harvey slipped Parish a demo tape at a club called the Electric Broom Cupboard. She was an unknown 17-year-old. He was in a band called Automatic Dlamini. “I was immediately struck by her voice,” said Parish. “The songs were very simple, strummy guitar folk songs. But, you know, her voice had real character already.”

Harvey and Parish started hanging out at gigs together, and eventually Harvey joined Automatic Dlamini on guitar and backup vocals. For three years, they worked together, honing a sound that relied on interlocking melodies and vocal harmonies for texture. Harvey eventually left to form her first trio, but the two kept in close touch.

Parish co-produced Havey’s 1995 album, To Bring You My Love, and, around the same time, began working on incidental music for a student production of Hamlet. “The music was also very dynamic and confrontational,” said Parish. “Polly came to see one of the performances and was completely blown away by it.” She called him up and asked if he would write some music for her, in a similar style, and she would put words to it. He worked on music, alone, and sent her the tapes. She sent them back with her singing and lyrics. The two of them were never, or almost never, in the same room writing together, yet the end result represents a deep, thoughtful melding of their separate energies. The first album, Dance Hall at Louse Point, came out in 1996 to critical acclaim, if very moderate sales.

And then 13 years passed.

“It’s funny, we weren’t aware of how long it was between the records until we started doing interviews about them,” Parish admitted. “It is kind of a long time. But I suppose because we’d worked on records in the interim period it didn’t seem like such a gap.” Parish played multiple instruments on Harvey’s 1996 album, Is This Desire, and produced Harvey’s most recent studio album, White Chalk. He also began building a reputation as a producer, working with artists including 16 Horsepower, Giant Sand, Sparklehorse, and Tracey Chapman. He’s recorded three solo albums over the last decade, Rosie in 2000, How Animals Move in 2002, and Once Upon a Little Time in 2005.

Harvey has been busy, too, but that doesn’t entirely account for the long hiatus. “The collaboration is something that we feel that we’re not able to repeat that often,” said Parish. “It does take quite a long time. We feel that we have to be into a different space. We need time to grow as artists between these records.”

Writing for A Woman a Man Walked By started in 2005 — and the earliest song, “Black Hearted Love,” bears a striking resemblance to Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea material. Yet the rest of the songs reflect a diverse set of styles and influences, everything from acoustic blues and all-out rock to the spooky, breathy lullabies of White Chalk.

Parish says that writing for Harvey is different from writing for himself, in a subtle, hard-to-define way. “I guess when I was thinking of things for Polly it meant that I would write much more dynamic music than I would write for myself. Because I think as a singer she is so much more amenable to perform over something that’s much more dense and much more abstract and much more ferocious than something I would be able to sing over.”

He added, “I approach it almost more as though I would approach writing music for a film, where I’m thinking, okay, it’s got to have really strong rising melodies, it’s got to have a very definite atmosphere. Because that’s what Polly expects and kind of thrives on. If I send her something with a really strong atmosphere, she’ll respond to that and she’ll come back with something that enhances it.”

The bargain that the two made was that Parish would write music and Harvey lyrics. Anything that didn’t work — for either of them — would be discarded, rather than fixed.

“We decided that rather than change things, anything that either of us was remotely uncomfortable with, we just wouldn’t work on it. We limited ourselves to the songs that we were really excited about,” Parish said. That meant no going back, no overdubbing, no tinkering with instrumentation or mood.

It also meant being willing to let songs go in unexpected directions. Asked if any of Harvey’s treatments surprised him, Parish chuckled and said, “Pretty much all of them.”

He consciously tried not to imagine what she’d do with the melodies beforehand. But even so, there were some turns he didn’t anticipate. “No one, obviously, could have predicted ‘A Woman A Man Walked By’”, he began, referring to a song where Harvey growls “I want his fucking ass,” repeatedly in a bracingly feral tone. “‘Pig Will Not’ was pretty, uh, shocking when I first heard it, too.”

“Even something like ‘The Soldier.’ I had no idea what she was going to do with that sparse ukulele piece. She’s taken probably the heaviest lyric on the record and it’s married with that really light open breezy instrument,” he mused.”

The album is varied, with the mood and texture of the music driving the lyrical content. Parish said that Harvey wasn’t trying to mix things up, exactly, but rather just responding to what she heard on the tapes. “The singing, the lyrics … it’s all very much Polly’s emotional response to the music,” he said. “She reacts to a piece of music and just starts singing with them. That’s why she’s singing with so many different voices and things. She says, I’m not acting or trying to be a different character. It’s what the songs make me there.”

Harvey has said that her collaborations with Parish have helped her grow as a lyricist, and Parish, too, finds that working with his old friend helps him stretch and expand his musical capabilities. “We’re quite hard with each other, critically. We expect a lot from each other,” he said. “But I think it’s really good to find people like that that you can work with. Where criticism becomes a very positive thing and you can really move each other on without making them lose confidence.”

Parish and Harvey are currently touring the US, playing songs from the new album, as well as Dance Hall at Louse Point with a five-piece band. When the tour finishes, Parish plans to take the summer off, then begin work on Harvey’s next studio album, which he will prodcue alongside Flood and Mick Harvey. He’s also finishing up the writing for his next solo album, and hopes to get into the studio before the end of 2009. And someday, perhaps in another dozen years or so, there may be another Parish/Harvey album. But ,Parish says that if there is, it won’t sound anything like the first two. “What makes Polly such a great artist, really what makes anybody a great artist, is to take a risk,” he said. “And that means going into really different areas and not be recycling old material. So if we do it again, and I hope we do, it’ll be completely different.”

That core, says Bell, is the songs themselves. “In the middle of everything chaotic, there’s a real song there. I could play them on piano and they would sound like regular songs,” he explained. “But everybody adds their own element, and when we get together as a band it becomes something else. That’s when it becomes chaotic.”

Even the band’s name expresses this fundamental contradiction, the sheer explosive power of its performance balanced with the likelihood of self-immolation. “We were looking for a name that expressed the state of being really fragile, because we felt like we were,” said Bell. “Every time we played together, it felt like everything was going to fall apart, but it never quite did. I had a dream reader do an analysis, and if you dream of crystal antlers, you’re imagining the fragility of the masculine.”

Fragile, maybe, but also enveloping, transporting, mind-shifting. You could close your eyes and believe you were at Altamont, Isle of Wight — any of the legendary ’60s rock festivals, really – but frontman Bell says that he sees Crystal Antlers as more of a punk band than a psych outfit. The band, whose members grew up on Southern California’s punk scene, revere Black Flag over Blue Cheer, and unlike heavy psych contemporaries like Comets on Fire and Howlin’ Rain, they perform well defined, premeditated song structures. “We don’t jam. We don’t improvise. Everything we do, we do with intent,” said Bell.

Crystal Antlers formed around 2007 in Long Beach while some of its members were still in high school. Originally a three-piece, the band has since expanded and contracted (mostly expanded) to include second percussionist Edwards, King (when original member Errol Davis left), and then to welcome Davis back this spring. At one time, everyone in the band was working for an old punk rocker who had started a chimney sweeping company. It was this boss who bought Crystal Antlers their first Farfisa and encouraged them to cover old ’60s songs that showcased its inimitable sound. The band’s first single, self-recorded and self-released, covered Blue Cheer covering Mose Allison’s “Parchman Farm.” The ’60s references, which still seem to chafe Bell a little, started right then, right there.

“A lot of people say that they hear ’60s psychedelia in our music,” he admitted. “But to us, we’re still kind of playing punk music. When we’d started none of us had ever played together. We were just trying to take this band and make something new. And what came out sort of ended up sounding like that, I think mostly because of the organ. We started playing with the organ, and it sounded very cheesy ’60s, so it was more a necessity than anything else. And I think the way that Victor plays it is pretty far outside anything from the ’60s.”

The band first gained traction with its 2008 EP, produced by the Mars Volta’s Ikey Edwards. A sweaty, surging blend of psychedelia, garage, soul and punk, the EP earned an 8.5 rating from Pitchfork and set off a mild media frenzy. Seizing the moment, they quit jobs, terminated leases, hopped a used school bus fueled with vegetable oil and joined the Fuck Yeah Tour with No Age in the summer of 2008. “That was such a risky decision,” Bell remembered. “We lost our jobs, our apartments…We just dedicated everything to the band.”

But it paid off. When the band returned, it was signed to Touch & Go, and poised to begin work on its full-length Tentacles. Bell already had a handful of songs, some of them written at the same time as the EP, others more recently plotted out on piano and Casio. With interest in the band high, there was pressure to finish quickly, but Bell noted that even so, their writing style had time to evolve. “It was much more collective this time,” he said. “Everybody wrote their own parts. We wrote all together.”

Now with a batch of new songs in the catalog, Crystal Antlers is touring with Constantines, the sold-out shows a far cry from early days playing biker festivals, punk squats and even, once, a wedding. Bell said they are hoping to make enough money on tour to rent a house and start recording when they return from road. There’s also a concert film by videothing.com’s Michael Reich in the works. “It’s like a post-modern tour documentary,” said Bell. “Sort of like The Hill, but a rock and roll version.”

Click here for a list of upcoming shows with Constantines.

Still, Bishop says he had never focused on the Arabic tradition in a sustained way. Not, that is, until the winter of 2008, when he landed at Sublime Frequencies head Mark Gergis’ apartment in Oakland. In a recent interview, we chatted with Bishop about the experience, delving into the new album, The Freak of Araby, visa issues with his backing band, and the implicit controversy of creating an album with a Middle Eastern influence.

Free of any performing or recording commitments, feeling limited by his primary instrument, the acoustic guitar, and tired of his home in Seattle, Bishop moved into Gergis’ apartment for a few months and discovered a trove of new influences. “Mark had an unbelievable collection of music here that he’s brought back on numerous trips to Lebanon and Syria and Egypt,” says Bishop. “There were stacks and stacks of CDRs and MP3s and DVDs. Most of it, you couldn’t even tell what it was because everything was written in Arabic.”

Being a guitarist – in a tradition dominated by the lute-like oud – Bishop was particularly fascinated with an Egyptian player named Omar Khorshid. Up until Khorshid, whose career spanned the 1960s and 1970s (he died in a car accident in 1981), most traditional Arabic orchestras did not employ a guitarist. It was only when he was invited, by the great Egyptian singer Oum Khalthoum, to play in her band, that the instrument began to become more common.

Bishop says he felt an almost immediate kinship with Khorshid. “In the early part of the career, he was playing standard and classical Middle Eastern songs with the guitar as the main instrument, and that just kind of spoke to me naturally,” said Bishop, who adds that he even found he recognized some of the material. “I had listened to a couple of his songs several years ago and didn’t know it was him, but one of those songs was actually a song that Sun City Girls used to do live on occasion,” he said. “We just thought it was a nice kind of Eastern sounding instrumental piece.”

Khorshid’s material isn’t easy to track down, but Bishop began collecting as much of it as he could find. “What I liked about his playing is it’s a very simple approach,” he explains. “He doesn’t do any shredding. It’s a clean sound with no distortion. It seems like the notes are very carefully thought out.”

That clarity, simplicity, and pop sensibility caught Bishop’s ear, but he had trouble assimilating it. “To be honest with you, I still haven’t quite figured it out,” he said. “I think it’s the simplicity of it is what confuses me. I keep expecting it to be more complicated. So I have kind of a difficult time with it.”

Moreover, Bishop found himself attempting to be true to a musical tradition that was based on different rules than the raga, blues or rock that he’d focused on in the past. “There’s a formula that he uses. I don’t know if it’s certain scales or modes, because I don’t really think that way. I never really was trained that way. So I don’t know,” he says. “It’s just one of those things that, to this very moment, continues to fascinate me.”

Bishop had already decided that his next album would feature the electric guitar, and he was thinking in terms of a clean, melodic, pop sound for it. He had no plans, right up until the first day he showed up in the studio, to make an Arabic-themed album. He did have one cover in mind, a song by Lebanese composer Elia Rahbani, who with his brother had written for the singer Feyrouz. He recorded the tune on the first day in the studio, along with one other original composition that had a bit of Arabic influence in it.

“Afterwards, I was listening to the cover, and an early take of one of these other originals that was kind of an Arabic-flavored song, and I just decided right then and there. I want the whole record to sound like this,” says Bishop.

Bishop called a bass player he knew who played in the Arab style. The musician offered to bring in two percussion players to the studio the next day. This Arab pick-up band recorded one day’s sessions and then disappeared. No one could reach them by phone the following day. (Bishop found out, weeks later, that their work visas had expired and they had been deported.) “The engineer, Scott Colburn, and I had to kind of learn how to play percussion really quick,” says Bishop. “We added the remaining percussion on the record, and I finished the bass parts.”

With the album finished – and the backing band nowhere to be found – Bishop began to think about his upcoming tour. He had already asked Bay Area improvisational band Oaxacan to open for him. He wondered, could they also fill in as the Freak of Araby ensemble.

Oaxacan jumped at the chance, and began familiarizing themselves with the Freak of Araby material, while Bishop left for a European tour. Oaxacan, a three-piece, consisting of Derek Moneypeny on guitar, Amy Friesbertshauser on vocals and keyboards and Mike Guarino on percussion, had some familiarity with the Middle Eastern styles Bishop was playing, as listeners and musicians. Moneypeny had traveled to Morocco on a music-finding expedition for the Sublime Frequencies label (run by Bishop’s brother Alan), and he noted, by email, that “We all have a passion for Middle Eastern music, and in Oaxacan we do, at times, play using something like the modes, the melodies and hopefully the feel of it. It comes out in an idiosyncratic way, but it’s there.”

When Bishop returned, they began rehearsing, creating a live show that is louder, more expansive, and more improvisatory than the record. “I wasn’t sure how it would work until we started a few practices,” said Bishop. “It was a little rough at first because they’re an improvisational band, so I didn’t know how patient they would be in having to actually learn songs. And at the same time, it was a new thing for me having to teach people these songs. I was all the sudden kind of in the position of being the boss. That was very uncomfortable for me.” But, he adds, the show quickly came together, as the four of them rehearsed album songs, some additional classic Arabic material and even a few Middle Eastern flavored Sun City Girls tunes. “I’m real excited about it,” Bishop says, “Now I don’t think there’s anybody better to be backing me up.”

Moneypeny, too, seems exhilarated by the gig. “The songs are a blast, Richard’s a joy, and it’s me getting to play with and support one of my heroes,” he answered when asked what he was liking most about participating in the Freak of Araby project. “How does that sound to you?”

Bishop started his tour in late May in Oakland, and will criss-crossing the US through June. And with the US at war in two Moslem countries, the fallout from Guantanamo continuing and ratcheting tensions with the Arab world, it is, to put it gently, an interesting time to be showcasing Arab culture.

Asked if he had considered the political implications of his latest project, Bishop answered, “Yeah. I did think about it for a few minutes. did think about it, and I thought, you know, fuck that. I kind of want to keep the music part of this separate from Islam, and all that people are going to associate that with.”

Is that possible? Even Omar Khorshid couldn’t keep the political world at bay. After playing in the US in 1981 to celebrate the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, Khorshid received death threats from Islamic hardliners. Many people believe that his death in a car crash in 1981 was no accident, but that he was pushed off the road. Yet Bishop maintains that however enmeshed Khorshid became in political conflict, and however deep the influence of religion and politics on all aspects of Arab culture, these songs can be appreciated on their own.

“There’s a side of Arabic music that a lot of people don’t know – that most of the classical songs – and a lot of the songs that Omar covered instrumentally – are about love,” he says. If somebody, for example Oum Khalthoum or Fairuz or Farid Al-Atrache is singing in Arabic and I’m paying attention to it and really getting involved in it, I can feel that. I can feel that that’s what they’re talking about.”