“Dan had this idea that he was going to cover his shirt in rubbing alcohol and come out with his arms on fire,” explains Shawn Greenlee. “He just got a little carried away.” The year was 1997, and Landed was about two minutes into one of their first shows, at the Met Café. Greenlee, Joel Kyack, and Rick Pelletier were on stage, and Dan St. Jacques was on fire. “We look down and see Dan coming out with his whole upper body completely covered in flames.”
Sam McPheeter’s band, Men’s Recovery Project, was headlining the show. He later recounted the experience in the zine, Shooting Space: “His head is not even visible inside the fireball . . . Eventually a good Samaritan blasts him with a fire extinguisher. The singer, in jeans, pink and smoldering but now identifiable as a person, not only remains upright but actually plays on for another good 20 minutes.” Later, with St. Jacques on his way to the hospital, McPheeter has a revelation: “The true weight of what has occurred finally sinks in. I’ve been ruined for all other bands.”
Landed began ruining people for all other bands in 1997 in an Atwells Avenue warehouse which Greenlee grinningly describes as “one of the Fort Thunder satellites.” This month the band returned from a three-year hiatus, with a headlining spot at No Fun Fest, the annual Brooklyn noise extravaganza and a brief tour culminating at AS220 on March 25. A slew of old recordings are being released for the first time, starting with a 12-inch record titled Times I Despise, out now on Providence’s Load Records.
Birthed from the bowels of Providence’s burgeoning noise scene, Landed has come to embody a moment when a sound that would become “definitive” was happily inchoate. Recordings are scarce and the pictures are mostly blurry and poorly lit. But the band’s progeny looms large. While the current lineup consists of long-time members Greenlee, Kyack, Pelletier, and St. Jacques, by 2002 the harried carnival of spirited noise and costumed antics had included 11 members, who have also played in Lightning Bolt, Six Finger Satellite, Chinese Stars, Pleasurehorse, Pink & Brown, the Coachwhips, Mindflayer, and Olneyville Sound System, among others.
While people have come and gone, Landed never broke up. Greenlee, the only member who has been with the group continuously since its inception, maintains that placing a premium on openness and adaptability has kept the group exciting and jokes about “passing on the Landed name to some younger guys.” Kyack is more direct: “Not one of our members has played in every Landed show. Hopefully someday you’ll go to one of ‘our’ shows and it will be a bunch of teenage kids from some suburb doing whatever the fuck they want.”
That openness extends to what is played. Sine wave generators, short wave radios, light organs, and other noisemakers sometimes replace bass, guitar, and drums; measured melodies crawl from the muck of frenzied improvisation. “People continue to experiment with blending new styles, sounds and sights as they have always done,” St. Jacques explains. “Landed is this process in action.”
That process is reliably dissonant, fractured, repetitive; tarry masses of sound bounding from one beat to another, feedback melting the bass and guitar into one viscous frequency. The players thrash and gasp and somehow churn out some groaning riff until it teeters on the brink of collapse, falls, and is replaced by another regiment, with bodies following. St. Jacques is often compelled to partake in “some slow-motion bowling to get [audience members] in the mood! I’m the ball and they’re the pins!” Despite the tenor of refined brutalism, the crowds are always happily perturbed, transfixed by a rotating cast more likely to grit their teeth, fall down, and commune intimately with concrete floors, or coat the floor in gallons of ice cream, than they are to play a boring note.
At one point the band ditched written material altogether. For a 1998 tour, Kyack, Greenlee, and St. Jacques decided to rely on improvisation — responding to each night’s environment and talking about the results in preparation for the next night’s show. But at the last minute Kyack’s back went out. Rather than cancel the tour, Greenlee and St. Jacques recruited Lightning Bolt’s Brian Gibson to play drums. “That was the mentality,” Greenlee remembers. “You see it through to the end.” St. Jacques avows audiences this time around can expect more of the same — the same being invariably different. Put simply, Landed was and still is “the sound you get when you put these four people in a room with some instruments and amplifiers.”