Sleepytime Gorilla Museum
Residence: San Francisco
Style: Your standard rock band with homemade instruments, a Dead Village People-ish fashion sense, time signatures with attention deficit disorder and tripped-out avant rock melodies. So they’re really just like everyone else.
Members: Nils Frykdahl (guitar, vocals), Dan Rathburn (bass), Carla Kihlstedt (violin, vocals), Moe! Staiano (industrial waste percussionist), Frank Grau (drums)
By Erik Fong

Idiot Flesh exhumed
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, born in 1998 from the ashes of San Francisco innovators Idiot Flesh, performed its first show to the standing-room-only audience of a single banana slug (true story). Drummer Frank Grau, who’s also a graduate student studying Political Science at UC Davis, describes the single philosophy that generates the power behind the band’s eccentric vision: “To look for new ways of approaching what might otherwise seem like pretty obvious choices in terms of music.” With a musical form comparable to that of artists like Frank Zappa and Mr. Bungle, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum achieves a tasteful balance of both technical precision and feel. Underneath the seemingly spastic syncopated beats, dissonance, time changes, distorted violins and complex melodies lies a solid backbone of groove. It’s like the rope climb – it may be difficult, but it feels great.

Music non-appreciation
Frank describes each member as “very unique in their own way,” and light-heartedly exclaims, “I’m the most normal out of all of them.” And there’s no exaggeration when Frank describes Sleepytime Gorilla Museum’s dedication to finding and discovering new ways of approaching music. Frank’s personal approach? Not listening to any. “I’m the only one in the band who does that,” reveals Frank. “Everyone else in the band is a totally prolific music listener. But about eight or nine months ago I had a purge where I just got rid of all of my CDs.” (Remember when you scoured the used CD sections about eight or nine months ago and came upon stacks of Debbie Gibson CDs? Now you know where they came from.)

Musical Martha Stewarts
Why settle for standard instruments when with a little bit of experimentation, a few good pieces of scrap and the need to hit things, you can, well, experiment with hitting pieces of scrap? Just a few items in Moe’s industrial waste percussion arsenal include amplified industrial springs, a marimba made from CO₂ pressure caps, pans and even a spatula wired to a microphone that he plays with a bow. Bassist Dan has a few toys of his own, such as an eight-foot wood beam with strings and an electric pickup – which he plays like a lower register slide – and even a Brazilian berimbau-like piece of wood with fishing wire attached to a hi-hat pedal for pitch shifting. Just call them the MacGyver of music.

Coming soon
After a summer jaunt through the United States, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum will release a live album in September through Sick Room Records, soon followed by another studio album next year to be released by Trey Spruance’s Mimicry Records.

Witness: Thursday, June 19 @ Bottom of the Hill; Friday, June 20 @ Santa Cruz Vets Hall (both with Estradasphere)
Albums: Grand Opening and Closing (2001) - available for purchase through Amazon.com
Sample: 1997 from Grand Opening and Closing
Website: www.sleepytimegorillamuseum.com