Since their 1990 debut at a loft party in downtown Los Angeles, where a version of The Sandals’ Theme From The Endless Summer spontaneously mushroomed into a 90 minute exercise in self mesmerism, the Dick Slessig Combo has stupefied audiences worldwide with their pseudo-structuralist approach to the interpretation of popular song.

Drawing on influences ranging from Chet Atkins to Terry Riley, Isaac Hayes, Javanese Gamelan, skipping records, and 70s disco, their music is simultaneously expansive and reductive, filtered through a decidedly ramshackle garage-rock sensibility. In his 2019 book The Wichita Lineman, Dylan Jones describes Slessig’s 2002 recording of that song as “the longest version of any song you’ve ever heard, elongated and slowed down so that it sounds even more like a lament, with a hyphen of silence between each note”. Likewise, Griel Marcus recalls in his 2010 book When That Rough God Goes Riding, his response to a Dick Slessig performance at the Portland Art Museum in 2000 of a rendition of George McRae’s Rock Your Baby “I could listen to that forever”.