Also this issue: Once More, With Feeling After an 18-year break, Mission of Burma's Clint Conley returns with a brand-new band. -Sam Adams Local Land-Marc One of the greatest living piano virtuosos calls Philly home. -Lou Camp Beat Box Hip-Hop & You Don't Stop -Ain� Ardron-Doley The Gig -Nate Chinen They Survived Philly -Patrick Rapa

May 9-15, 2002

musicpicks

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

Rock/pop

Making music out of cans, bells, bongs, gongs, guitars, pump organs, autoharps, electric violin and any number of homemade stuffing and amplified doodads, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum are simultaneously ridiculous and sublime, luridly horrific and delicately beautiful. On their Seeland label debut Grand Opening and Closing, San Franciscans Nils Frykdahl, Carla Kihlstedt (of Tin Hat Trio fame) and friends cram almost as much tremoring terror into nine tracks as the Stooges did on Funhouse, cluttering all edges of an elongated elastic "Sleep Is Wrong" and their sullen, stolen harried-Hank Williams moment "Ambugation" with psychotic reactive improv-rock-calamity while still finding room for vocals. Born of Bay Area art-provocateurs Idiot Flesh, SGM carry on and on and on with prog-rock pugnaciousness but without the pomp or circumstance. Yet, they manage to be goofy and gracefully tuneful. Go figure.

Tue., May 14, 8 p.m., $7, the Troc, 10th and Arch sts., 215-922-LIVE, www.thetroc.com.

÷A.D. Amorosi