Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (SGM) – the most gloriously unclassifiable American band in existence – is bringing back the apocalypse. The esteemed curators of SGM are proud to announce a series of Grand Reopening tours, recordings, and related events. On any given night, SGM’s live set careens from euphoric to eerie to egoannihilating wall-of-sound. Gleefully dark and joyful noise emanates from a wild array of instruments, many homemade. Crowds are engulfed in circuitous melody, strange bursts of color and light, unknowable time signatures, spasmodic dance.

A Sleepytime performance is never just a string of head-bangin’ anthems. Each song is an elaborate journey of its own, often clocking in at 10+ minutes, framing cameos from friends and family in the form of Butoh dance, parades, puppet shows, even the occasional impassioned oration of Italian Futurist poetry. People speak in hushed tones about the live shows like rites of passage. What was an average local rock club just hours before is transformed into a volatile dreamspace where anything can, and does, happen. Flustered reviewers, desperate to pigeonhole the ineffable, have labeled SGM everything from neo-RIO (Rock in Opposition) to avant-prog metal to grindcore funk theatre to, in the words of one particularly rapt concertgoer, “some kinda Satanic Anarchic Viking Shit”. None of those descriptors come anywhere close to conveying the band’s ethos.

Sleepytime’s arsenal of instruments ranges from the searing violin of a certain lady, standard rock fare of electric guitars, basses and drums, to intriguing contraptions from various folk traditions, to junkyard percussion and Fisher Price toys, to horns ‘n’ bells ‘n’ rusty trash can lids, to a collection of handcrafted one-offs including the Percussion Guitar, the Wiggler, the Spring-Nail Guitar, and a brutal, seven foot long piano-stringed bass behemoth called The Sledge Hammer Dulcimer.

Together the group has penned lyrics inspired by the Unabomber, by James Joyce, by Muriel Rukeyser, by madness, by a stroke-stricken obstetrician, by love, by death, by cockroaches, by the increasingly bleak industrialized end times we’re all enduring. The band sports blackened teeth and spiked leather gauntlets and bonnets and tri-hawks and military khaki and antique lace nighties. They croon lilting postmodern folk melodies enmeshed with face-melting blasts of pure untrammeled black metal. Well, drop-kick a lithopedion, lizards and germs, because it’s time to ROCK AGAINST ROCK AND REJOICE! Run, walk, crawl, slither your way to one of their upcoming shows. Whatever you gotta do to get to the club, where some truly spectacular DIY-or-Die-Tryin’ art and community awaits you. Bring your body down to where SGM always has and ever shall live: on the loving, bleeding edge of an interrobang. This singular act is not to be missed. This message approved by The John Kane Society