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Here’s a Californian band with just enough of a cult following to delight music lovers converging on the Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville this weekend.
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum sparked interest among musique actuelle fans after a decade or so of silence prior to this revival.
The band re-emerged with “Of the Last Human Being”, a hybrid album warmly welcomed by its base. The SGM experience involves furious real-time performance, offered by unbridled artists who sing and also play multiple instruments, both consecrated and invented.
SGM has been described as a catalyst for metal, progressive rock, classical/modern/contemporary music and contagious theatricality!
Let’s talk to guitarist, flautist and singer Nils Frykdahl, to get us ready for the concert on Saturday May 17 in Victoriaville.
PAN M 360 : Recently Sleepytime Gorilla Museum was back in action after a long hiatus. An album last year, new concerts, new projects… Why did you re-form the collective ?
Nils Frykdahl: The long hiatus was an accident. We were always just about to attend to our unfinished business, but the various exigencies of life…families, elders, children… had led us to opposite coasts and three different regions of Northern California. Finishing the album and the film naturally brought us to our favorite medium of all: the stage.
PAN M 360: Prog, metal, grindcore, funk, jazz, classical contemporary music, art rock… How have the musical genres and sub-genres evolved within this large band ?
Nils Frykdahl: We listen to and enjoy music of all kinds and it all swims through us and emerges differently from song to song, with all of us writing and none of us filtering by genre.
PAN M 360: Let’s be more specific: before integrating them into your language, what forms do you take from metal? From prog? Funk? Jazz? Other influences?
Nils Frykdahl: Certainly the application of the principles of African polyrhythm to heavy music was one of the founding gestures of the band. After being introduced to polyrhythm by CK Ladzepko, for whom it must be felt in the body..”it must come out dancing”, and after feeling the coexistence of 2,3, and 4, it was only natural to try extending the numbers… 5 and 3 living together so merrily in Sleep is Wrong. A contrasting sonic gesture, found in some modern classical, free jazz, and extreme metal, is the overwhelm of rhythm: too fast or chaotic
complex to be truly felt as a pulse or pattern. This then is not rock&roll, but mediation music, primarily for religious purposes.
PAN M 360 : How are you perceived by fans of each of these genres?
Nils Frykdahl: No doubt some see us as monsters or transvestites, but there are open-minded folks in all of these genres ready to celebrate this incredible world with us.
PAN M 360 : Do you primarily reach an audience interested in avant-garde forms of music?
Nils Frykdahl: No. We attract thrill-seekers of all ages, some of them who self-admittedly do not listen to heavy or avant-garde music generally. We are always thrilled to bring unlikely listeners into the beauty of these forms.
PAN M 360 : How do you attract others, if at all?
Nils Frykdahl: It seems that the exclusionary nature of genre boundaries is less restrictive than ever before, with artists and audiences skating freely around the world and centuries. The Big Ears festival in Knoxville Tennessee that hosted us last year being a prime example.
PAN M 360: The writing of your works is precise and rigorous, and so is the execution. Could you describe the creative chain, from composition to recording and public performance?
Nils Frykdahl: The songs initially start with one of us, but are then put through a rehearsal intensive process with each player fashioning their part. This rethinking is never entirely finished, even after recording, as honing in continues during each rehearsal, which we just finished 4 days of here in the old wooden Community Hall in Woods Hole MA. All will be slightly new.
PAN M 360 : Are you adept at hyperactive collage, as Zappa was throughout his career, or Zorn at certain moments?
Nils Frykdahl: No. Our songs maintain a jealous distinctness from each other, often being about entirely disparate things or calling up highly specific emotions.
PAN M 360 : Your interest in text is important. You’re not planning “normal” song forms; text and vocals (or growl) are materials among others. Why integrate text and vocals into this music? What themes or literary approaches are driving them? We know that you were interested in Dadaïsm
Nils Frykdahl: Our interest in Dada is in its catalyst as a positive defiance of the policing of artistic correctness, the separation between artifice and sincerity, meaning and non-sense, theater and authenticity. The interpretation of Dada as nihilism has no interest for me.. too easy. Of course life can be interpreted as meaningless. Open your eyes, salamander.
Most of the songs start with verbal impulses which shape the flow of the music, but sometimes the other way around.
PAN M 360 : You’ve been described as a collective. How do you maintain the cohesion and motivation of such a collective?
Nils Frykdahl: Our mutual enjoyment of each others’ often surprising input is part of what drew us to each other in the first place, so many years ago, wanting to work with folks who we could not second guess. The cohesion is now maintained by the effort of extensive travel, but that in itself is something many of us love.
PAN M 360 : How would you describe the process of creating the works, the compositions, the space reserved for improvisation, the appropriation of the material by the performers and the execution?
Nils Frykdahl: Improvisation is generally only written into the music in fairly small ways, but the inevitable chaos of the live show provides opportunity to see what happens when we are taken by surprise.
PAN M 360 : What are the dynamics of leadership and personal investment within the collective?
Nils Frykdahl: We all contribute according to our inclinations. Some are more likely to make breakfast, some dinner, some sauces.. This includes our crew: John Karr on sound, Wind Beaver on merch, driving and knowing most things, and new for this run Lyndsey on lights (though a late passport may keep her out of Canada, alas).
PAN M 360 : How do we maintain such a company in 2025? On a day-to-day basis?In the medium or long term?
Nils Frykdahl: In fits and starts, and with the aid of new long-distance communication machines.
PAN M 360 : Is this your first concert in Quebec?
Nils Frykdahl: No. We played in Montreal at least once or twice before, and many of us were also there in other projects. In fact, the Greenless Wreath song on “In Glorious Times” was begun and largely written on Mont Royal on a walk there in the shifting wind of a stunning autumn-into-winter day.
PAN M 360 : What are your future plans?
Nils Frykdahl: To raise our voices in songs of praise! At your house!
LINE UP:
Nils Frykdahl – guitar, flute, voice
Carla Kihlstedt – violin, percussion guitar, voice
Michael Mellender – guitar, Tangularium, trumpet, percussion, voice
Dan Rathbun – bass, Sledgehammer Dulcimer, Wiggler, voice
Matthias Bossi – drums, percussion, voice
