For the third installment of this year’s Soy Festival, the Nantes-based Yamoy association brings us two groups recently signed to Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace. New acquisitions, but by no means wet behind the ears. Dating back to the mid-90s, Sunburned Hand of the Man and Jackie-O Motherfucker are the pioneers of a New Weird America that takes pleasure in denaturing the codes of traditional American music.

“Welcome to the New Weird America,” wrote The Wire in July 2003, extending a hearty salutation to free-folk collective Sunburned Hand of the Man. The expression was a reference to the “Old Weird America,” a term coined by critic Greil Marcus to describe the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), famed for catalyzing a folk revival upon its release and inspiring, among others, the young Bob Dylan. New weird America… a term that speaks as much to Sunburned’s traditional roots as to its penchant for the outré.

The collective’s continually evolving cast of characters—tonight, John Moloney on drums, Rob Thomas, Paul La Brecque and Ron Schneiderman on guitar, and Sarah O’Shea on vocals—hail as much from the universe of visual art and performance as that of music, and it shows. Sunburned’s live set resembles a pagan rite in which bearded men sporting deer heads and fringed leather vests parade through the audience flailing long, tortured tree-branches crowned with latex animal heads.

The music, at first, is little more than a diegetic byproduct of the ritual unraveling before us. We catch the sound of a few metallic objects clanging into one another, a few hesitant guitar notes, a swelling voice. Little by little, the musicians abandon their totems and hone in on their playing. The music allows itself to be more present, more structured. More violent as well. Dark, throbbing guitar riffs, indefinitely repeated, adhere into an atmosphere at once bewitching and suffocating.

Next up, Jackie-O Motherfucker, an experimental folk collective formed in Portland in 1994 by Tom Greenwood and Nester Bucket. Protean by nature, the collective began as a guitar and saxophone duo, accompanying itself with home-made sound collages, rock mash-ups and hip-hop beats. JOMF's lineup for its European tour is a classic one: a drum kit, two singers and three guitars wired to multiple effect boxes. Three guys and one gal, one of them proudly sporting an Ecstatic Peace! T-shirt.

JOMF's set is a long voyage through a universe of meandering and occasionally disturbing folk. As their melody and vocal lines and the initial simplicity of their chord progressions will attest, the group’s sound anchors itself resolutely in the heritage of traditional American music. But JOMF takes on this legacy in order to pervert it, channeling it into experimentations that border on the psychedelic. Traditional song structure is rejected. We catch a verse here and there, but never a refrain. As soon as we sense a formal structure taking shape, the members of JOMF take delight in losing us again with their improbable solos, which evolve over time into mantras. JOMF would seem to do everything possible to hypnotize the listener: heady riffs utilizing a limited pitch range, the intricate interplay of three guitars going in and out of synch at will, their play with protracted duration.

JOMF’s drummer only rarely offers up a rousing beat, contenting himself with punctuating the sound of the guitars, one of which has been tuned down to a bass. Sometimes, within the transparent swatches of sound issuing from the four instruments – voices arise. Sometimes a male voice, at others a woman's. Voices that groan in complaint more than affirm anything, that implore rather than preach. Breathy voices which rapidly melt into the general waveform of sound, waxing and waning in volume, taking the listener on a journey to the farthest, uncharted depths of this new, strange America.

Our only regret is that the John Calian violin present on numerous JOMF recordings could not join the three guitars that evening.

Words: Sophie Pécaud (2007)
Translation: Emilie Friedlander
Photo: Renaud Certin

Concert: October 29 2007, Nantes.



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