Sleepytime Gorilla Museum play RIO Butoh-metal. As you might suspect from this designation, their music does not submit to easy description. The following entry will focus upon the esthetics, intentions, and significance of their live presentation and not upon their recording, because their own focus and importance lies in stage performance.

The band formed in late 1998 and come from the Bay Area. They consist of: Nils Frykdahl - guitars, vocals; Carla Kihlstedt - violin, vocals, homemade guitar laid flat and fretted by slamming drumsticks onto the neck, toy piano; Dan Rathbun - bass, vocals, producer-engineer, 9-foot-long slab of wood strung with six piano strings and played with a slide, indescribable one-stringed widget involving a bamboo bow on a hi-hat stand; Moe! Staiano (this is how he spells it!) - junkyard percussion including cooking pans, small oil drum, tuned gas-bottle pressure-caps, and other metallic odds and ends; and Frank Grau - drum kit. Dan and Nils came from Idiot Flesh; Carla checked in from the klezmer-rock band Charming Hostess; Moe! and Frank (replacing original drummer David Shamrock*) arrived from the experimental-improv scene - Moe! from his own project Moe!kestra and Frank from Species Being. Their name comes from a New York artists' studio space, print shop, and series of surreal performance-art Happenings in the first half of this century.

Unlike most progressive bands, they tour extensively, usually making two or three coast-to-coast road trips a year. They do so because they have achieved one thing that very few progressive bands manage to accomplish: They have built a respectable following almost completely outside of the progressive community - an odd Mulligan Stew of metalheads, goths, punks, artists, tribalists, and ordinary punters who saw them and got hooked.

Their live show deserves a lot of the credit for this: using bizarre makeup, costumes ranging from ragged sheets to stained tuxedos, and contorted facial expressions, SGM present a nightmarish gaggle of thrashing, lurching, staggering grotesques. This connects in some way with a band-mythology fully as bizarre and elaborate as Magma's, if not quite so creepily off-putting. While highly theatrical, their act hasn't a hint of Spinal Tap dorkiness, and luck has nothing to do with that: Nils has studied performance art quite seriously and at this point, may know it as well as he knows music. A good deal of the band's esthetic derives from Butoh, a Japanese form of modern dance which aims at communicating a sort of pre-rational dream-state and requires its nearly-nude, white-painted dancers to perform every movement, especially the slowest, with tense and ferocious conviction.

Their music has the same striking, exaggerated, larger-than-life expressiveness. SGM don't simply play music - they perform it: almost every note gets bent, faded in or out, blurted, swallowed, screamed, snarled, shaped in some other over-the-top fashion, and put across as if it might be their last. Even the quietest passages get that kind of emphasis - and the band may stay quiet for five or six minutes, slowly building their way to pounding, crushing, headlong passages that rock like the Crack of Doom. And nobody, not even in Death Metal or Hardcore Punk, rocks harder. Yet they manage to do so without sinking into cliches, to balance right upon the very fine line between intellectualized attempts to rock out and Dummkopf Buttrawk without falling to either side. Some prog-fans might find them harsh, vulgar, and unsubtle, and they definitely play to the cheap seats, but few would deny that their approach accomplishes what it sets out to do.

The music they've evolved has very little to do with symphonic, Canterbury, or fusion. Significant parts of it seem to come from the Art Bears - but they somehow make that uncompromising approach reach people without dumbing it down. Echoes appear of Van der Graaf Generator's unhinged song-structures and quavering emotionalism, and of King Crimson's grinding off-kilter riffs. In addition, they have considerable Industrial-Tribalist leanings, a buttload of Heavy Metal influences, and they tend to play progressively-derived ideas in those styles. However, the result rarely comes out like conventional prog-metal. Fans unaware of their less-familiar antecedents may see them simply as a bizarre metal band, one which uses dissonant musical craziness to convey overwhelming emotional craziness.

SGM also possess an experimental-music ensemble's fascination with sound: the crashes, clangs, boings, and screeches of metallic junkyard percussion; the rumble, twang, and ZOOP of homemade string instruments; the odd timbres that stomp-box effects and unconventional playing techniques can produce from conventional gear; and the mumbles, growls, whispers, yelps, howls, and other noises that human throats can emit. They have very respectable compositional chops, unlike most textural sound-explorers: They can imagine and build a clear, well-defined musical context for every one of those strange tone-colors and find an emotional meaning for each. And they do have considerable instrumental skill. The guitar parts range from folky arpeggios to Frith-like leads to Hammer-of-Hell metal riffs; the violin shades between meltingly beautiful classical melodies, David Cross scratchiness, and pure squawking noise; the bass plays simple but pulverizing and absolutely solid lines; the junkyard provides clattering fills, colors, and effects; and the drums go from minimalist understatement to mosh-pit aggro. Quick, technical, full-of-notes passages rarely appear - when you aim to put overwhelming feeling into each and every note, you don't want to play a lot of 'em. Vocally, Nils's scratchy bass-baritone sounds a bit like Peter Hammill singing heavy metal, while Carla's harsh soprano resembles Dagmar without the German accent (Dan's decent but less-striking voice handles mostly backups). The lyrics which they howl out with such ferocity appear to deal with a variety of real-life emotional issues, but tend away from the overly direct - they communicate the feeling without exposing details. The songs work well: underneath the white-knuckled performances and Martian textures, they seem to have a strong sense of harmonic direction, and this hidden clarity may have something to do with how their music communicates to general audiences. SGM don't make things complex for their own sake - or simple for their own sake. Everything comes from the meaning, from the emotion the music needs to convey. The tunes don't sound impressed by or even aware of their own cleverness. However, the band's considerable virtuosity shows in compositional smarts, in fiendishly difficult rhythmic synchronizations, and in performing some pretty hard music with both utter precision and the manic intensity of a three-chord hardcore band.

Besides building an audience from the general public, SGM have done one other thing that might seem impossible. They found a context for, not just progressive rock, but RIO complexity and dissonance outside of the prog-rock box. RIO bands may have a great deal of feeling, but they even put off many progressive fans because of their left-wing academic "refusal to pander". Like Hanns Eisler**, they seem to consider working subversively within public taste as tantamount to simply selling out to the mob. SGM, though, don't approach progressive music from an intellectual-idealist stance, but from a populist one: They understand that people want music to stir them, respect them for wanting that, and accept them as their current selves rather than what an intellectual artist might think they should become. And they don't confuse that with talking down to their fans.

The band's own musical preferences parallel this: They enjoy Metal and Industrial music for their own strengths. They love playing them. Yet they know how to bring a composer's sensibility to the enraged onslaught of Metal, the tranced-out rhythmic drive of Tribalist, the nightmarism grimness of Industrial, the spooky tension of Experimental textures, and the uncompromising conviction of RIO. They use each as an expressive opportunity and not as a stricture to work within. Viewed in this light, their Art Bears influence comes as an unexpected reflection of Metal's furious aggression - a music of subtler but equal power whose harsh, off-center, unrelenting wrongness makes it far more disturbing than any straight headbanger band. Both styles use musical extremes to convey overwhelming emotion; and so do all the band's other influences: Experimental music provides the ominous emptiness and crashing apocalyptic explosions, Industrial music the grinding psychotic paranoia, Tribalist music the Dionysian abandon. And here again, as in everything, the Butoh esthetic shows up: even at their quietest, all these styles have overpowering intensity in common.

And finally, that intensity lies at the center of the Sleepytime Gorilla approach and ties everything they do together. Some may see them as calculated and thus ultimately fraudulent. Their music and stage-show do consist of a performance by serious artistic professionals. They don't originate from real life-or-death desperation in the way that Punk, Metal, Country, and Blues do (or must appear to). They may not convince hipster intellectuals in their endless search for the authentic or mosh-pit bruisers who live it 24-7, can recognize the real thing, and reject anything less. But SGM have committed themselves to becoming the best band and performers that they possibly can, and have done an awful lot of musical and theatrical homework to that end. They believe in music, in Art as something that should overpower anyone who experiences it. And to that purpose, this band has set out to reclaim progressive rock as a live music, as a performance: to engage an audience with theatrics, to pull them along with extended, traveling song forms, to use dissonant complexity for its huge potential emotional power, to play with such energy that their music's difficult strangeness doesn't matter, to produce an experience so overwhelming that it makes the punters take notice. Progressive rock could - should - have that kind of force. It needs to consist of more than standing motionless, hoping to floor audiences by playing convoluted, jaw-droppingly difficult technical passages. Over some thirty-five years, progressive artists have developed a vocabulary of immense potential, but far too many of them have said far too little with it. These guys try to make it live up to what it could become.

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum have taken on a set of Herculean tasks: To keep their music on a very narrow path - intelligent but not intellectualized, artistic but not arty, and visceral but not buttheaded. To shade between genres that seem only vaguely compatible and somehow keep the strong points of each one. To know performance art so well that they can put on a theatrical show and have it work instead of turning into a bad joke. To play with such force that all of this works and they convert the doubters. To tour constantly and get it out there. And I think that they do a pretty good job of all of these. Their material and their presentation may not please every prog-fan or everyone in general. But at heart, it remains true to the progressive ideal of music as transcendance and keeps it alive on into the coming century. -- John Hagelbarger