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Noise boys
Sunburned Hand of the Man
BY JAMES PARKER
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Sunburned Hand of the man's official Web site

Let’s give paranoia a chance. Let’s free it from its baser associations — squinting suspicion, black helicopters, low-grade mental heebie-jeebies, and so on — and see it instead as a special brand of awareness. Because when Robert Thomas, of Sunburned Hand of the Man, says, "There’s a way we approach the everyday that is spacious, paranoid and beautiful," and then adds, "We can see it in each other’s eyes," you know he’s not talking about hiding under the bed making enemy lists. He’s talking about a glimmering, not-always-pleasant apprehension of what might, just might be possible . . .

Sunburned Hand of the Man are — well, what the hell are they? A pulsating octopoidal group mind experiencing itself fearlessly through music and woolly hats? A collective of shifting numbers and multi-instrumental abilities working out of a Charlestown warehouse who begin each show and recording session in a state of absolute musical virginity and radiant cluelessness? It’s all improvised, it’s all spontaneous. The basic sound is something rattled and compulsive, a drifting freak-funk panic attack within which any amount of digression or fixation is permitted. For 10 minutes, they might sound like the Boredoms with Jah Wobble on bass, before drifting into a netherworld of chants, feedback, and shockwaves without origin. "With us," says co-chief John Moloney, "we like to say the music’s already there, we’re just pulling it out of the air, out of the space we perform in. We have no control over it." So what is it? "I call it prophecy."

Does he sound like a hippie? He ain’t no hippie. The Sunburned idea mushroomed of its own biological momentum out a hardcore band called Shit Spangled Banner, attracting energy and people as it grew, and the performance ethic is as punk rock as it gets — nothing is forbidden except dullness, to which there is, at every show, a sort of floating hypersensitivity, an allergy that might erupt in a rash of ugly noise or surly on-stage antics. "When the band started back in the ’90s," says Thomas, who works at Central Square’s Cheapo Records, "there was a real deep improv scene going on around here, but we left those people out to dry. They were pretty buttoned-down, with an intellectual, analytical coldness to a lot of what they were doing — they definitely didn’t have time for freewheeling expressionism like ours. Then there’s the jam circuit — and on paper it might look like we fit into that stuff too, but the musicality is so different. We’ve got this open-ended thing going on, but it’s not gonna set the night on fire for some Phish fan, y’know?"

Sunburned Hand of the Man have been on the cover of the British magazine the Wire, they’ve been filmed by Dutch television, they’ve toured with everyone from Four Tet to Comets on Fire, and they’re both the vanguard and the outer edge of the spook-folk psycho-shambles-whatever movement that somehow comprises both the black drone of SunnO))) and the twitterings of Devendra Banhart. As Thomas and I speak, they’re preparing to embark with Magik Markers, a like-minded group of noise lovers associated with Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label, on a tour that arrives at P.A.’s this Sunday. So how come Boston hasn’t clasped them to its bosom as one of the most original and exciting of our homegrown phenomena? Where have they been all our lives? "We’ve been here," says Thomas drily. "But we’re pretty insular, and I’ve never really considered us a local band — what we do is globalization anyway, and we play more out of town than we do in. Until 2002, we kept everything under wraps, put out a few CD-Rs, toured around a bit and did shows, but it was basically a cryptocracy, it was real willful obscurity — I did not want to talk too much about it or put something out there until I was sure that everyone in the group was on the same page and we had something that was genuine, and I didn’t want to play games with the local scene, either."

Not some band of hotshots panting for their close-up, then. This year, Sunburned released Wedlock and Complexion (both on Eclipse). In September, they played Arthurfest, the two-day event in LA’s Barnsdall Art Park that brought together, for the first time, a good number of the artists who might be considered their peers: Growing, Merzbow, Josephine Foster, Dead Meadow . . . "It was kind of a magnifying glass for that whole scene," says Thomas. "I saw about 800 guys wandering around who were the spitting image of Devendra Banhart. I think it’s all coming to a head, and it’s gonna pop pretty soon. You’re gonna hear a lot less people talking about folk and ’60s-revival stuff — which is cool. I feel like we’ve been doing something for a long time and we’re gonna keep doing it."

But the craziest thing about this gang of fad rejecters and old-school experimentalists might be how contemporary they are. This is the iPod age, when your average music consumer has ascended with little white earphones into a floating pasture of sound, a limitless, simultaneous vista of anything he/she wants. "It’s a breakthrough in consciousness," Thomas agrees. "Everybody’s listening to everything, all the time, on some continuous shuffle, and that’s something that we had going on in this band from the very beginning. You know, guys like [John] Zorn, what they were doing in the early ’90s, with the jump from surf music to klezmer and then back to speed metal, all within one composition — that can be technically impressive and fun to listen to, but it never really blew me away because I was thinking, well, ‘Why can’t everything happen all at once? Like life?’ " And that, my friends, is the new definition of paranoia.

Sunburned Hand Of The Man + Magik Markers | PA’s Lounge, 345 Somerville Ave, Somerville | Oct 23 | 617.776.1557.

 


Issue Date: October 21 - 27, 2005
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