Gugon, O Key, Suki Mourning Thugg
Abyssinia
229 S 45th St.
Philadelphia
April 14, 2026
Is it too strong a statement to say I live for novelty? The thrill of the new, blah blah yada yada. Someone else said that somewhere, so I’m not being terribly novel saying it now, but it’s inescapably true: whenever I have a new sensory experience, like Sam Cooke sang, it freakin’ sends me. (That’s how it went, right?) Last night at Abyssinia, plenty of that new new was on display in general, but I have to highlight a specific moment from Suki Mourning Thugg’s set. The Suki band was a trio composed of electric guitar, drums, violin and voices (with a brief foray into droning button accordion) – existing somewhere at the nexus of no wave, free jazz, skronk, sonorism; fun stuff, truly. They were playing songs, with settled forms, but with emphatic, explosive moments of improvised fury and whole sections of anything-goes freedom. Guitarist Will McGoran rapidly switched his volume signal off and on, giving the terrain a pitted texture; vocals were blended and submerged; violin screamed and scraped; drums were tinkered with excitedly and perpetually. The music opened and closed up craters, a mood of menace prevailed. Yet I was positively giddy during a passage where McGoran was rhythmically strumming his six strings with the volume just completely off – no electrical signal amplified into the space, just the acoustic sound of the metal strings against skin, pure quiet percussion, the connection between string and pickup hopelessly cut off. Taking advantage of even the tiny sounds an instrument makes – the ones usually covered up or canceled out by bigger or more assertive sounds – is always bound to get me excited, and it was a prickly delight on its own, but I’d never seen anyone do this on purpose in such a sudden, unexpected way. Their whole set rewarded this kind of close attention.
Talking with Gugon’s guitarist Danny Murillo after their closing set, we agreed: “The guitar is a drum.” “It’s just a fancy tambourine!” is how Murillo put it to me, and while Gugon performed what I’m guessing was a single long improvisation, he was literal about it: aggressively up-strumming muted strings, literally hitting the guitar, sliding his hands around for the glissandi effect, slamming his foot on effects pedals almost less to turn the processing on or off than to turn the click into a hellish, subby stomp. The ensemble’s music was an incredible tangle of rhythms: live mixing and processing ambiguating the source of sounds, dirt-simple low-end rumble, kinetic-and-frenetic 32nd-note hyperactive drumming, sauna-like hissing noises, and, according to my notes, “French horn like whoa.” Blasts of horn were seemingly looped, grabbed or re-sampled on the fly by Sam Leidig, stationed at the noise table. Gugon asked, and satisfactorily answered, their own question: “Maybe everything is a drum.”
