Sleepytime Gorilla Museum Announce Reunion Tour, New Album & Short Film
Well, it looks like the donkey-headed adversary of humanity is reopening the book, reopening the discussion. Born in Oakland, California, and eventually spread over the entirety of this thoroughly unready nation, avant garde theatrical extreme progressive metallers Sleepytime Gorilla Museum raised over $144,000 on Kickstarter last month to complete their new album, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum of the Last Human Being, a half-hour-long short film called The Last Human Being: A Critical Assessment, and a full US tour. Their original goal was $75k. Their stretch was $100k. They got nearly double what they wanted when they launched it. My only regret is that I didn’t find out in time to throw money at it. Obviously they survived.
That was what Sleepytime Gorilla Museum did over the course of three studio albums — the last of them, In Glorious Times, came out in 2007 through The End Records shortly after they moved to Brooklyn — and a live record, a whole mess of tours, side-projects, videos, homemade instruments, costumes, A-R-T art, and so on between the late ’90s and 2011. They survived, thrived even, as if on the sustenance of creative impulse itself. By absolutely bizarre coincidence, their name came up in conversation at my daughter’s sixth birthday party this weekend, and I guess the algorithm was listening since next thing I knew my wife showed me the tour poster. I guess sometimes that whole invading-privacy things works out. Score one for social media ads, I guess.
Bottom line here though is this is a multi-genius band. Carla Kihlstedt, Nils Frykdahl, Mattias Bossi, Dan Rathbun and Michael Mellender would seem to be the current lineup, and each arrives back at Sleepytime Gorilla Museum with a catalog well worth searching out if you feel like your life isn’t weird enough as I know you do. The tour starts on Leap Day, which is cute, in Cali and finishes the first week in April, having looped back to the Golden State to finish. You can see the dates below. Probably don’t need me to tell you the routing.
There’s much more to read and dig into if you want, and the version of this text on Kickstarter — in addition to being a good deal longer and not actually featuring the tour dates written out yet; DIY art! — has links you can click through and all that. Yes, it’s a lot — they agree — but Sleepytime Gorilla Museum have always been a band to dig deep. To wit, I’m about to spend probably way too long reading about John Kane. So here’s that reunion info:
We, the John Kane Society, in partnership with the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and associated acts, trusting in the stalwart spirit of mutual aid and emboldened by YOUR TUMESCENT ENTHUSIASM, have launched this Kickstarter on behalf of the Museum’s imminent GRAND 2024 REOPENING.
It’s time for SGM to BRING BACK THE APOCALYPSE just when the world needs it most! Namely, with a full-length studio album, a short film, select live appearances, and, once we meet our STRETCH GOAL of 100K…
A NATIONWIDE U.S. TOUR!!! WE DID IT!! WE’RE DOIN IT!!! WE HAVE DEFEATED THE INTERROBANG!!
The Sleepytime quintet on one of their many cross-country tours of the continental U.S. sometime in the late aughts. Big sky country. Summer tans / sunburns. In costume.
Our group has already spent countless hours prepping for SGM’S reunion. The core team hovers around a dozen. That’s including the five curators. We all have day jobs or kiddos or other complex caregiving responsibilities, not to mention other bands to juggle, along with steering a bunch of fidgety behind-the-scenes biz stuff that’s gotta happen pre-Grand rereopening to ensure that whatever final form #SGM2024 takes, it will be a success and a delight for all participating. (Whew!)
We’re committed to paying our full team enough to hold everyone steady over the next few months as we work side by side, rebuilding this complex creative engine.
Please do share this tour flyer far and wide, friends.
SEE YOU IN THE NEAR-TO-IMMEDIATE FUTURE.
https://www.songkick.com/artists/549434-sleepytime-gorilla-museum/calendar
02/29 Arcata, CA Humbrews
03/01 Eugene, OR WOW Hall
03/02 Portland, OR Aladdin Theater
03/03 Seattle, WA Crocodile
03/04 Boise, ID Treefort Music Hall
03/05 Salt Lake City, UT Metro Music Hall
03/07 Denver, CO The Bluebird
03/08 Estes Parl, CO The Stanley Hotel
03/09 Estes Parl, CO The Stanley Hotel
03/11 Kansas City, MO Record Bar
03/12 Minneapolis, MN The Fine Line
03/13 Chicago, IL Lincoln Hall
03/14 Indianapolis, IN Irving Theater
03/15 Cleveland, OH Beachland
03/16 Philadelphia, PA Underground
03/17 Cambridge, MA The Sinclair
03/18 Brooklyn, NY Elsewhere
03/19 Baltimore, MD The Ottobar
03/20 Carrboro, NC Cat’s Cradle
03/21-24 Knoxville, TN Big Ears Festival
03/25 Atlanta, GA Terminal West
03/26 Winter Park, FL Conduit
03/27 Tampa, FL Orpheum
03/28- New Orleans, LA 0 Howlin’ Wolf
03/29 Houston, TX Secret Group
03/30 Austin, TX The Mohawk
03/31 Dallas, TX Trees
04/02- Alberquerque, NM Sister Bar
04/03 Phoenix, AZ The Crescent
04/04 Tucson, AZ 191 Toole
04/05 Los Angeles, CA The Fonda
04/06 Berkeley, CA The UC Theatre
Various members of Sleepytime have sustained a long-running creative partnership with gifted storyteller and choreographer Shinichi Iova-Koga, artistic director of the physical theater & dance company inkBoat, for decades now. “Shinichi Iova-Koga’s work is grotesque, beautiful, and funny. As a dancer he is never less than mesmerizing — ephemeral like smoke, limpid like a vernal pool” says Rita Feliciano of the SF Bay Guardian. “He has developed a personal form of mixed-media dance theater that integrates contradictory impulses — the ancient and the technological, the chaotic and the formal, nature and nurture. He might be called a dancer at the edge.”
Shinichi’s work with the curators has resulted in some of the most vividly strange and lovely moments in the Museum’s history. Over time, a cabaret-tinged narrative starring Shinichi in the titular role of “The Last Human Being” was brainstormed and nurtured, workshopped, and toured.
In 2011, Shinichi, the band, and a production team were in the midst of producing a thirty-minute musical film –The Last Human Being: A Critical Assessment– when SGM abruptly disbanded. The quintet had reached a sudden unavoidable crossroads.
There would be no more midnight-hour MacGyvering, not for a good long while. It was beyond time for the enormous, exhausted Art Bear known as Sleepytime to curl up in the back of the curators’ Brockhurst studio and take a long-overdue siesta.
In April of 2011, with their listenership packed into the rafters, SGM played four final live shows in California. Immediately afterward, everything having to do with The Last Human Being project was shelved.
Costumes were folded up and tucked away in cedar trunks and grubby plastic bins. The demos and mixdowns gathered dust on Dropbox. Film footage got stored on a hard drive that would eventually fail, requiring a substantial data recovery investment in 2022 that emptied SGM’s savings account. (And it was worth EVERY PENNY. Just wait’ll ya see Blixa Bargeld’s cameo! The talk show banter! The protest dance sequence!)
Promises were made to the band’s extended creative family and audience; this would NOT be the last we heard or saw of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. The grieving curators reassured their listeners that a comprehensive live DVD compilation was still in the works, as well as The Last Human Being film, plus a final eponymously named album, “nearly done!”
We’ll find our way back to all this, everyone agreed. The collective work was too wonderful and strange, too dear, too much a community-wide effort to be left languishing in cryofreeze forever.
Then, before y’know it, life… happened. Trump happened. Plague happened. Joy and loss happened. The brutal kleptocracy of it all deepened. Years went by. “Sperm swam. Eggs applauded. Babies hatched. Other bands were born. The SGM fields lay fallow for a decade and more,” confirms curator Matthias Bossi. Several beloved friends and family members passed away. Labels and alliances perished. 156 moons, vaporized in a blink by the callous ray gun of linear time! Still, everyone in the band agreed: eventually, one way or another, their exquisite LHB exhibit needed to taste the light of day.
Over the years there were multiple false starts and stalled-out attempts to ‘rouse the Art Bear. Every one of them failed until, in mid 2022, a series of raucous symposiums were instigated both via zoom and in person, bringing together longtime friends and professional music industry wunderkind to work as a team, all of us determined to Bring It Back. Soon the Museum’s outer parlour was full of laughter and song again. Everything that could return would return. All five members of the band were in. It was swiftly determined that past bandmates and satellite projects would also be involved in meaningful ways. A shambolic-but-mighty MUSEUM VOLTRON assembled.
SO. HERE WE ALL ARE.
“It’s a LOT.” confirms Mallory McAvoy, SGM’s Communications Director. “All very much on a shoestring. To pull it off, each member of our team is doing at least three separate jobs.” None of us are “in it for the money”. That doesn’t mean we won’t need a bit more of it to safely whelp this behemoth.
This is 2023. It’s not a DIY-or-die ethos we’re embracing. More like DIY-and-don’t-die.
We are, of course, well aware what a fraught moment in time this is to be attempting a largely self-produced reunion. But it’s like Nils once bellowed at the febrile night sky beside the bus outside a beer hall gig in Santa Cruz way back when:
“BE HERE NOW, BEAST.”
What a precious moment this is, breathing and being together in the lush, green forest of STILL HERE. It’s unlikely we’ll get the chance to invest in SGM’s frabjous wares and workings so cozily again.
The international John Kane Society is resolute about seeing this adventure through. We believe wholeheartedly in these human beings and the music they make, the mentoring they do, the communal art they foster, the robust families they’re raising both together and apart, the PTSD-stricken chums they’ve never given up on, the bridges we’ve all built together spanning decades, and the songs we’re all longing to hear burning to light. It’s now or never. WE MUST KNOW MORE.
If you’re all in, we’re all in.
In outlandish solidarity and with irrepressible glee!
Meredith Yayanos
Co-founding Editor of Coilhouse (2007 – 2013), creator and director of The Parlour Trick (1999 – present), adjunct member of Faun Fables (2007 – 2010), and Ordained Symposiarch of the John Kane Society (2021-present)
AMBUGATON.
From left to right: Dan Rathbun, Nils Frykdahl, Matthias Bossi, Michael Mellender, Carla Kihlstedt. Photo: Olivia Oyama
https://www.facebook.com/sleepytimegorillamuseum/
https://instagram.com/johnkanesociety
https://sleepytimegorillamuseum1.bandcamp.com/
https://linktr.ee/sleepytime_gorilla_museum
