Sir Richard Bishop, Porest, White Shark Shiver
Recommended
Back in August, Sir Richard Bishop christened Pickathon’s Woods Stage with its very first set of the festival, while most revelers were still groggy. It was perhaps the perfect time for Bishop’s bewitching guitar reflections—he coaxed rich textures from a semi-hollow-body guitar, conjuring east-meets-west melodic structures through a bevy of instrumental tunes. Bishop, of course, is best known as a founding member of experimental art-punk project Sun City Girls, which had a 26-year tenure that yielded over 50 albums. Since the band’s dissolution in 2007, Bishop has continued to release mind-warping guitar meditations, most recently with last year’s Tangier Sessions. It’s a dizzying collection of neoclassical compositions with brilliant guitar playing, and fuses together styles as seemingly disparate as flamenco, jazz, strange avant-garde, and pretty much every other genre you’ve ever heard. Bishop taps into a truly wordly aural contemplation—you oughta tap into it, too. RYAN J. PRADO