Sunburned Hand of the Man, the genre-defining psych folk collective lead by John Moloney, is ready for yet another release this year. Not surprised? That’s probably because Sunburned Hand of the Man can’t go more than six months without putting out a new album. Maybe this will surprise you: their new album, Fire Escape, was produced by Kieran Hebden of Four Tet.
Four Tet, the handle for Hebden’s electronic solo work, has long been utilizing the jazz-inspired, computer-edited, cut-up sampling style to remix the work of a wide variety of artists, including The Notwist, Radiohead, Badly Drawn Boy, and Kings of Convenience. But Fire Escape marks the first time that Hebden has tried his hand at folk music since Pause, the 2001 release that inspired reviewers to coin the term “folktronica.”
After reading David Keenan’s August 2003 article in The Wire entitled “New Weird America,” the term journalists have been struggling to pin onto the emerging crop of neo-psych-folk acts, Hebden began collecting any of the releases he could find under the Sunburned Hand of the Man name. By 2004, he had contacted the collective, and they opened for Four Tet for two weeks in 2004.
Hebden’s love of Sunburned Hand of the Man grew over the next two years, and in 2006, things got intimate. He recorded the band in a studio in London and reconstructed the album to fit his idea of a Sunburned record. The collective also recruited Yamatsuka Eye, frontman of japanese ambient noise band Boredoms, to do the artwork for the album.
As for the line-up, Sunburned Hand of the Man is back with a pared-down septet lead by Moloney that includes Hebden on the piano and drum machine. You can get your copy of Fire Escape October 2 from Smalltown Supersound.
Four Tet: “She Moves She”