Monday, March 01, 2010


Me on the latest Sunburned Hand of the Man album - though given that they did twelve albums alone in 2009, it may not be their latest any longer...perhaps with the increasingly cheap access of music technology and production these days, there's just too much music? Then again, Sunburned are simply following in the DIY ethic espoused by Merzbow, Sun City Girls, The New Blockaders, etc. and other underground artists in the 80s, in which their standard practice would be to release an enormous amount of mostly improvised music, no matter how lo-fi the sound; the only difference now is the format - a cornucopia of CD-Rs rather than tapes.
What's interesting with that Sunburned album is the way they approximate something similar to the early 80s focus on drums and funk in (mostly) white guitar music, with heavily rhythmic bands such as Liquid Liquid (whose 'Optimo' track - or at least what sounds like it - I'm pretty sure Sunburned sample at the start of A), 23 Skidoo, A Certain Ratio, and even This Heat, as well as very early 80s Eno - which may, of course, be down to the presence of Keiran 'Four Tet' Hebden in the producer's chair. For a band often derided (with some justification) as a shambling jam band, Sunburned can actually venture into some pretty original and innovative places.

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