Six Finger Satellite

It's common knowledge by now that Providence (Rhode Island) has been, in recent years, fertile ground for the proliferation and spread of a whole series of bands capable of rewriting the history of noise-rock – and beyond – adapting it to the aesthetic decentralization of the new millennium and to procedures that could be described as more artisanal in nature. Just think of shapeless creatures like Lightning Bolt, Mat Brinkman or Men’s Recovery Project. A lot is known about these, especially the former, at least within underground circles. Because it's in these circles that Fort Thunder was born: an abandoned factory in the Olneyville industrial district, occupied by local artists who had, more or less directly, ties to those bands (it was in fact Brinkman and Brian Chippendale of Lightning Bolt themselves who took over the space), and which functioned, from its occupation in 1995 until its demolition in 2001, as a genuine Factory-Squat for the city's scene.

That said, it should be added that perhaps less is known about Six Finger Satellite, the band led by Jeremiah Ryan and Rick Pelletier, who set up the Parlour recording studio, thereby writing themselves into the key chapters of Providence's musical history. In fact, they earned their place there all the more when Sub Pop released their debut album, “The Pigeon Is The Most Popular Bird”, in '93 – an album which, while diverging in results from the work of future local bands, nonetheless laid the groundwork for what would come to be known as the Providence Sound.

But how did the style that would come to define one of the least musically-relevant cities of the time, in terms of youth culture, actually come about?

With Six Finger Satellite, the sources from which sonic material is drawn are all to be found in new wave – to the point of making them, in a way, forerunners of today's other phenomenon, neo wave – as well as in no wave, in the most skeletal electronics, in industrial, in the post-hardcore of Jesus Lizard and, more generally, in all the noisy offshoots since the '80s (Sonic Youth first and foremost). Naturally, all of this is filtered through the exclusive “sensibility” of the band's individual members, starting with the inspired lyrics of singer Jay Ryan, which add a further sense of moral drift to the work in question – indeed, perhaps it's the missing (or lacking) irony that marks one of the “ideological” differences between 6FS and the more jocular attitudes of Fort Thunder – and continuing with the scant technical proficiency, made up for, however, by the overwhelming incisiveness of guitarists John McLean and Peter Phillips, and above all by the rhythm section's ability to programmatically channel the group's stylistic drift, thanks to Rick Pelletier's drums and Kurt Niemand's bass.

It will therefore be striking to trace all of this across the ten tracks of their debut record, tracks interspersed with just as many interludes (“Untitled”), plus a final untitled one lasting almost fourteen minutes. It's “Home For The Holy Day” that lays out the work's first constitutive coordinates, with the neurotic drive of the voice and rhythm section, typically in a destructured-hardcore style, and guitars that in some way anticipate what will become more evident in the next track, “Laughing Larry”, namely the syncopated/dissonant attitude of the textures, which clearly recalls the punk-funk style of certain British post-punk (Gang Of Four, Pil) and the new wave of Talking Heads. Then comes a à-la Chrome digression that leads into “Funny Like A Clown”, the only space, along with the disco-punk of “Save The Last Dance For Larry”, granted to “comedy”, albeit a rather bitter one.

But it's in the gap between the sixth track and “Deadpan” – a listless post-hc number that foreshadows architectures echoing those of Birthday Party, clearly evident in “Hi-Lo Jerk” (or in the noisy “Takes One To Know One”), complete with a dazed harmonica underscoring the overall raw-nerve mood – that one notices the spastic electronics once again (and it won't be the last time) drawing on the impossible pastiches signed Helios Creed & Damon Edge.

And while “Love (via satellite)” brings to mind a slightly more cerebral Jesus Lizard, the Dadaism of the eighth “Untitled” instead ushers in the chaos of “Solitary Hiro”, another pseudo-funk number that explodes into an out-of-tune hardcore, riddled with dense electronics that make everything increasingly alienating.

The compendium of this – degraded – artistic practice can be found in “Neuro-Harmonic Conspiracy”, a postmodern dance in which the residual (mechanical) vitality of what was once “historic” new wave turns into irreversible apathy, thus salvaging only the purely automatic part of the dance, now devoid of any emotional content that isn't in some way tied to the pathological.

Closing things out, as previously mentioned, are the fourteen minutes of the final “Untitled”, a psycho-industrial tangle that seems to gather up all the previous interludes into a single, hallucinated cauldron stretched out to an extreme degree.

In any case, even though the foundational qualities of “The Pigeon Is The Most Popular Bird” are largely a legacy of the most visceral (noise-)rock, one shouldn't forget that Six Finger Satellite's stance is that of a group of intellectuals grappling with the analysis of modern man's everyday degeneracies, complete with erudite references flaunted whenever the occasion calls for it. And it's probably in this sense, too, that they set themselves apart from all the other local bands that would emerge shortly after (despite having had no shortage of drug troubles themselves). But perhaps it's precisely here that the band's greatness lies: in having been able to make the most neurotic side coexist with the most impetuous one, without excluding thought from that context – in what would seem to be, ultimately, a decidedly postmodern approach to compositional synthesis. Plus, on top of it all, a ruthless eye.

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12/06/2011