Sun City Girls

Static from the Outside Set

BY Kevin HaineyPublished Apr 1, 2006

If ever there were a group who deserve the career spanning overview treatment, it’s the consistently contrary and constantly confounding Sun City Girls. And who could be better fit to present such an introductory exercise into the widespread annals of audio buggery than Sun City Girls themselves, those three men from Phoenix, AZ (or Sun City) who first came together in 1981? Static from the Outside Set (volume 14 in the Girls’ Carnival Folklore Resurrection series) was originally aired as a radio show, and such a fast-tempered and jumpy format couldn’t be more ideal for threading together the many fascinating facets of Sun City Girls: speedy agro punk meltdowns, folk-y meditations, conceptual avant-garde chamber compositions, tossed off pop covers, sub-reggae dwellers, cut & paste sound collages, spoken word comedy subversions… The Girls have seemingly done it all, and this mind-reeling archival collection (everything here is previously unreleased in any form) brings their highly contrasted visions crashing together in one aural hallucination that will make you feel that much closer to understanding these ahead-of-their-time innovators in the broadest sense you can comprehend. Of course, they’ve only printed 1000 copies of this, so if you want your history lesson, you’d better act quickly.
(Pixar/Buena Vista)

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