The
Sun City Girls' contribution to Three Lobed Recordings' Modern Containment series is an archival treat rather than something new. Recorded for a Seattle radio show of the same name on the KCMU station in 1994,
Live Room is a 50-minute live-in-studio capturing of the band as its muse stood at that time -- as always with the
Sun City Girls, there's no exact pinning them down to anything if they can help it. If anything
Live Room shows them at their most inclined to appreciate
Sun Ra, with the brief piano instrumental "Invocation #1" leading into the 15-minute "The Ghengis-Necro-Nama-Khan, Pt. 4." Generally alternating between softly miked but insistent -- to put it mildly -- spoken word parts (the parts about "closet sorcerers" and a reference to the spaghetti western classic Duck, You Sucker are standouts) and brief clattering blasts of percussion and piano, it's not quite beat poetry gone (more) wrong but it is something wonderfully unique. From there the trio pursues similar and similarly unusual paths, from the growling mountain man talking about "an entirely new state of becoming" on "Children of Gravity" to exploring various conspiracy theory questions about what UFOs and the like are up to. If the band had ever wanted to pursue life as storytellers with various musical interjections, this provides some entertaining evidence as to how that would have played out -- consider the verbal gymnastics on "Anonymous Disclosures, Pt. 1" alone, as a full head of steam is worked up. Best bizarro comedic moment -- the dialogue on "Anonymous Disclosures, Pt. 2" about, among other things, whether one can struggle against the inevitably of death and the alien "plan" designed to wipe out three-fourths of humanity. Best line in isolation, from "Unsolved Mysteries of Pop Culture": "Well, the seventies never did happen, but let's pretend that they did."