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Six Finger Satellite together again, playing Brooklyn

by Black Bubblegum

6FS

The reunited Six Finger Satellite are coming back in NYC, having scheduled August 15th at Southpaw, their only date at the moment. Tickets are on sale.

6FS reunited in 2007 and released Half Control, a record originally planned prior to their break-up, the next year on Load Records. Their “newest material is still being worked on” and the band is “searching for a label to help unleash the anschluss”. Until that materializes, heres some background interesting facts on the band which at one time included John Maclean (AKA The Juan Maclean) as well as a soundman named James Murphy:

Maclean and Murphy met while each were building his own recording studio around 1990. They bonded over a shared love of dance music at a time when techno carried no cachet in indie rock. “You might as well have said you listened to country music,” Maclean says. When Murphy became 6FS‘s soundman, he built a mammoth PA system that he dubbed Death from Above, a name he also scrawled on a military-style T-shirt that he wore almost every night. Murphy and Maclean liked to think of the PA as their version of a Jamaican dancehall sound system, but with a punk kick: Murphy “would make it so punishingly, deafeningly loud that you had no choice except to deal with it head-on,” Maclean recalls. Like Martin Swope in Mission of Burma a decade earlier, Murphy became a de facto fifth member of 6FS

Unwittingly, Six Finger Satellite were sketching a new canon that the DFA would codify a decade later…. 6FS were often described as a cross between Big Black, Devo, [and] crypto-fascist German electronic duo DAF, whose music [they] openly pillaged. -[The Boston Phoenix]

To be clear, 6FS is/was much more than just a launching pad for DFA. Check out more on the history of the band at the world’s most accurate online encyclopedia. Six Finger Satellite recently played Great Scott in Boston, MA (a review from that show here) as well as Machines With Magnets in Rhode Island. Video from R.I. is below.

The Juan Maclean is scheduled to play Webster Hall with The Field. Tickets are still available.

Video below…

Six Finger Satellite at Machines with Magnets, Pawtucket, RI