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XPN & Y-Rock Welcome Man Man

Presented by WXPN at Trocadero Theatre

March 5, 2010

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From Anti.com:

Before the beginning...

Before the world came into existence, all was a chaos, unimaginably limitless and without shape or form. Eon followed eon, particle became mass: then, lo! out of this boundless, shapeless mass something light and transparent rose up and formed the heavens. And from the heavens fell five shapes, loud and heavy and jumbled, and from these rough forms were shaped and sculpted the first firsts: Honus Honus (the High-August-First-Voice), Sergei Sogay (the Divine-Center-of-Four-Strings), Pow Pow (the August-Beat-Divinity), Critter Cat (the Divine-Twang-and-Everything-Else) and Chang Wang (the Other-Twang-and-Wondrous-Everything-Else).

And they set out to fill the yawning void that gripped the earth, and they crammed the emptiness with sounds, of voices and guitars and drums, yes; but also with squeaky toys and pots and spoons and cap guns and chopsticks and old shoes and fruit and stuffed frogs. And such was their exuberant good time, and such was the mess they made, that they did not see their jealous creator, envious of their ingenuity and novelty items, sneaking up on their ebullient pandemonium and casting them out...

Today...

In their lost divinity, Man Man took up residence in Philadelphia, perhaps because of the Sweet Philly sound, Noam Chomsky, the water Sun Ra was drinking, Charles Barkley's elbows, the excellence of the Philly lacrosse team or Rocky or Betsy Ross or John Coltrane. Or maybe it was it's close proximity to south Jersey.

Never you mind. The point is, Man Man keeps on keeping on, filling the blankness with their weird/beautiful, esoteric/heart-rending, profound/hilarious sounds. There is so much lovely commotion to be made, Man Man famously does not break between songs during their live shows, but rather moves, revolving-door fashion, from one song to another, commandeering and discarding any of number of the instruments lying at their feet as the mood strikes and the music dictates.

Comparisons to the usual avant-garde forefathers - Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Tom Waits - persist, but Man Man are decidedly not identity thieving or even overtly referencing these spiritual godfathers in their music, but rather are acting as torchbearers of the unusual, the spontaneous and the plainly fucking funny in an increasingly homogenized world.