In 1981, in the golf course purgatory that is Phoenix, Arizona, a pair of half-Lebanese brothers from Detroit and a So-Cal transplant formed Sun City Girls (named after a nearby retirement community). Unclassifiable from the start, guitarist Richard and bassist Alan Bishop, along with drummer Charles Gocher Jr., were cacti in the hardcore punk scene: prickly, unapproachable, yet strangely beautiful. These “girls” understood that punk at its purest meant total negation of the genre, and for decades they confronted their audiences with the detritus of the music world: Dada, Kabuki, prog, hobo monologues, puppetry, unfettered noise, surf instrumentals, guerilla street theatre, and so on and so forth. Their official discography wavers between fifty and a hundred releases, no two quite alike, but the sounds within provided mutant genetic code for much of the current American underground: bands like Animal Collective, Deerhoof, No-Neck Blues Band, Six Organs of Admittance, Devendra Banhart, and Dengue Fever took the Sun City Girls’ cue to elucidate international noise through their own local muse.

At the height of Thriller mania in 1983, the Bishop brothers voyaged to Morocco. Rick stayed for three weeks, whereas Alan immersed himself for two months. By day he jammed on sax and guitar with local musicians; by night he captured snippets of shortwave broadcasts. Twenty years on, he would weave these audio artifacts into Radio Morocco, the seventh release on Sublime Frequencies, the “world music” label/collective he co-founded with Hisham Mayet and his brother (with frequent contributions from Mark Gergis, Robert Millis, and others).

Eschewing the rubber gloves of elevator world-music labels and the ivory towers of academic ethnomusicology, Sublime Frequencies’s recordings and videos dunk listeners and viewers headfirst into the cultures they document. Following the example of Smithsonian Folkways and Ocora, each SF release reveals music and sights that are at once workaday and bewildering to Western ears. From Iraq’s Choubi music to Syrian Dabke to North Korean pop and opera, the label determinedly showcases the uncanny beauty from purported “axes of evil” and other non-tourist destinations.

Cantankerous, chain-smoking, and obsessive, Alan Bishop is hell-bent on undermining Western hegemony and exalting the cultural contributions of the downtrodden. This interview took place on the phone, with Bishop in his garage office where he was hard at work on the next batch of SF releases and preparing for the final Sun City Girls tour, a tribute to Gocher, who passed away from cancer in early 2007.

—Andy Beta

I. OBSESSED LIKE ME

THE BELIEVER: In the liner notes for your Radio Morocco sound collage, which you recorded there on your first trip in the early eighties, you mention how you came across Thriller being...