As part of Seattle's Sun City Girls, one of underground music's most revered bands, Sir Richard Bishop usually played guitar while masked and costumed. He, brother Alan Bishop, and the late drummer Charlie Gocher gained a reputation for upturning conventional notions of live performance. At a Triple Door show earlier this decade, for example, they hit golf balls into the crowd, spouted virulent anti-­American sociopolitical commentary while roaming around the elegant dinner theater, and wore Osama bin Laden masks during the height of his reign as Most Wanted Terrorist.

Sun City Girls' live unpredictability also funneled into their recordings, which varied wildly in style and quality. Omnivorous genre hybridizers and assimilators of many nations' musics, Sun City Girls toggled between iconoclasm and reverence, while filtering everything through a warped beatnik/mystic sensibility that unfailingly provoked strong reactions. At their best (Torch of the Mystics; 330,003 Crossdressers from Beyond the Rig Veda; Bright Surroundings Dark Beginnings), SCG made some of the most transcendent, third-eye-popping music ever.

When Gocher passed away in 2007, Sun City Girls disbanded after 25 years of activity. Sir Richard Bishop had started his solo career in 1998 with the brilliant Salvador Kali, but with SCG defunct, he's intensified the focus on his own music.

"I was hoping SCG would go on forever," says Bishop, who now lives in Oakland. "I think we all were. We had a lot of ideas and tricks still hidden under the sleeves that we never got to pull out. But at least we still have a ton of recordings that may eventually see release."

But Bishop's not one to dwell on the past. He's forged on since '07 to issue some of the best music of his career with While My Guitar Violently Bleeds, Polytheistic Fragments, the God Damn Religion DVD (with its infernal soundtrack, Elektronika Demonika), and his newest full-length, The Freak of Araby.

While the SCG canon contains a great deal of irreverence, Bishop seems to have tempered that impulse in his solo career.

"I do miss the irreverence factor that SCG embodied," Bishop admits. "But it's always been a part of my being. I just haven't really employed it in my solo work because it doesn't fit in as well as it did with the band. It's a different thing altogether."

Speaking of different things, The Freak of Araby represents Bishop's first non-solo effort under his own name. For this album, he enlisted the Oakland band Oaxacan—featuring a percussionist, a drummer, and a bassist—to help him execute several covers of Arab classics and his own Middle Eastern–­flavored compositions. He also brought his electric guitar out of storage and busted out some Moroccan chanters, which he plays with gusto on the thrillingly blasted "Blood-Stained Sands."

"I was getting frustrated and tired of playing just solo acoustic guitar, especially for live shows," Bishop reasons. "I wasn't coming up with any new material or approaches that were satisfying, so I had to step away from it for a while—but not forever."

A tribute of sorts to Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid, Araby finds Bishop at his most structured; it also includes some of the most sensuously propulsive rhythms to appear on one of his records. His famous fiery fluidity is put into the service of traditionals, covers, and originals that tap into Arab music's predilection for florid melodies that exude a profound yearning. Traces of these elements, of course, surfaced in some of SCG's finest work, but Araby is Bishop's most explicit nod to his Arab heritage (he's half Lebanese).

Another notable Bishop aesthetic departure, Elektronika Demonika, was created on synths and shortwave radios. It conjures a much darker, even horrific, mood than his other works, which usually radiate a kind of clarity and enlightenment. That being said, some of Bishop's songs attain such a frenzied tempo—especially those on Improvika—that they inspire thoughts and imagery of a demonic nature. It brings to mind the question of whether Bishop tries to generate more light than darkness through his art.

"I don't think about it as much as I used to with SCG. When I am playing solo, I'm usually aware of any forces if they are present, regardless of shade, but I try not to pay too much attention to them because I can get easily distracted. That approach doesn't always work, but I do try to remain focused on the moment and try to concentrate on the quality of the music and how it will relate to others. I leave it up to the listeners to use their own powers of perception to determine if there are any strange forces at work."