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Spray it, don’t say it

Saul Jacobowitz of the Human Hairs

Saul Jacobowitz and Angela Sawyer love to spout garble. And as the HUMAN HAIRS they do it so well. Stuttering, squawking, and spewing nonsense, the local duo are inspired by the sillier side of sound poetry. Think poetry without words, dada, Marinetti’s Futurist classic “Zang Tumb Tumb.” Add distortion pedals, cracked electronics, and, well, you get the picture.

“We figured out pretty early on that we’re both interested in making the funniest noises possible with our mouths,” says Jacobowitz (who also plays in a more winsome and traditional rock band, Windy Smiles) of the duo’s formation. “That combined with some homemade electronics and some duck calls sort of rounded out the project.”

Their first bracing performances in the autumn of 2007 were met with an enthusiastic — if sometimes bewildered — audience response. Since then, the duo have tweaked and refined their peculiarly entertaining approach to noisemaking. And in so doing they’ve dialed the volume back a bit. According to Sawyer, who is in more bands than we can print and runs the wonderful Weirdo Records on-line shop, they needed a way to hold their ground “in the midst of fist-pumping noise dudes and local rock derelicts.”

“We sort of stumbled on a way to play noise quietly — like yelling at a whisper,” Jacobowitz says of this new approach. “It allows for more subtlety of texture and mood changes, and it’s more enjoyable to play that way. It’s still the same squawks and burbles, though. Yeah, it's sound poetry, but we use more electronics and effects and feedback than the official definition calls for.”

This Monday, June 30, the Human Hairs are part of a quadruple bill (put together by Sawyer) at P.A.’s Lounge full of aural eccentrics, with Kentucky lo-fi non-hipsters WARMER MILKS, Northampton’s FAT WORM OF ERROR, and local duo BABA YAGA.