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
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (SGM) – the most gloriously unclassifiable American band in existence – is bringing back the apocalypse with a series of Grand Reopening tours, recordings, and related events. In early 2024 after a 13-year hibernation, they re-emerged from the earth like a brood of cicadas with their fourth studio album — of The Last Human Being — and swarmed across the US with a 5-week tour. They are now bringing the swarm to the EU in the summer of 2025.
On any given night, SGM’s live set careens from euphoric to eerie to ego-annihilating 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, framing cameos from friends and family in the form of Butoh dance, parades, puppet shows, and the occasional impassioned oration of Italian Futurist poetry. What was an average local rock club just hours before is transformed into a volatile dreamspace where anything can, and does, happen. People speak in hushed tones about the live shows like rites of passage. 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 traditional violin, trumpet and flute to standard rock fare of electric guitars, basses and drums, to intriguing contraptions from various folk traditions, to junkyard percussion and Fisher Price toys, to xylophones ‘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. They croon lilting post-modern folk melodies enmeshed with face-melting blasts of pure untrammeled black metal.
