Particle Acceleration

The Photon Band is a band.

by Michael Pelusi

Just a reminder: The Photon Band is, in fact, a band.

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It's easy to lose sight of this. After all, for more than 10 years, the local band has been a vehicle for Art Di Furia and his distinctly spacey-yet-earthy songs. Filled with chunky guitar riffs and raw reverb, Di Furia's music perfectly distilled his love of '60s pop and R&B into a uniquely personal sound.

In recent years, however, The Photon Band has been more of a rumor than an active unit. This has been partly due to Di Furia's long-in-the-works doctoral thesis on Renaissance Italian architecture for the University of Delaware, as well as his teaching position at Moore College of Art and Design. And so, Photon Band releases have become increasingly infrequent, and live performances equally so. Their last album, 2003's It's a Lonely Planet, felt like a solo work, eschewing Who-style rave-ups in favor of more intimately psychedelic songs.

When the time came for a follow-up to Lonely Planet, Di Furia was ready for a change. "I got so sick of hearing playbacks of just 16 tracks of me," he explains over beers at Tritone. "It's really easy to make a song sound nice and tight when you're doing that. And the stuff on Lonely Planet where there are drums, it all locks in real nice, and that's because I know exactly what I'm gonna do next. But there's something too antiseptic about that, and after a while it begins to rankle on my ears. And I started to crave doing something that was a little bit less Syd Barrett-y."

Now there's a reconfigured Photon Band lineup of Di Furia, longtime bassist Jeff Tanner now on guitar, bassist Chris Kubicek and drummer Jason Kourkounis. They have a new label, Empryean Records out of Rhode Island (also home to Super Furry Animals, Eric Matthews and others). Most notably, they have two releases set for 2007. First, at the end of this month comes an online-only EP, Get Down Here in the Stratosphere, available on sites such as iTunes and eMusic.com. Then in June, the band will release a full-length, Back Down to Earth.

On the new releases, although Di Furia handled a fair share of the instrumentation, he also had a lot of help from Tanner and Philly music vets like Brendan Gallagher, Ed Farnsworth, Dave Frank and Dmitri Coates.

The two new releases are aptly titled; combined, they prove that The Photon Band is indeed residing in this stratosphere. The music is earthy, rocking and funky. Throughout, Di Furia constantly evokes Jimi Hendrix, from the "Crosstown Traffic" echoes on "Find a Better Way to Live" on the EP, to the "Manic Depression" waltz of "Thinkin' Boutchoo" on the full-length.

Di Furia says he "just decided to embrace" the Hendrix-isms. "When you hear a song that you think would be more appropriate for The Jackson Five or Aretha Franklin than The Photon Band, but you try to record it anyway, and you just play it the way I like to play guitar, the result is that it sounds like Jimi Hendrix."

A local music veteran who's also logged time as a member of The Lilys and The Original Sins, Di Furia says the Philly scene has changed over the years. "I think that people are a lot more supportive of each other than they were when I started playing, which is good. But I grew up in a generation where everybody was really mean to everybody else. Nobody talked to each other. It took a lot for people to like your band, they were really cynical audience members. Philly was always a tough crowd. And I kind of miss that. Sometimes a Philly show feels like an Up With People concert, where everybody's so supportive of everybody else. Kind of makes me sick," he says with a wry smile.

Noting the polished nature of many new bands, Di Furia believes that "they need to go up onstage and make a mess of themselves." Regarding The Photon Band record release show this week, he says, "I have a feeling that some people will look at us on the 23rd and they'll say ... 'These guys are sloppy, they're out of tune, they're too loud.' But that's the way we like to play."

(m_pelusi@citypaper.net)

The Photon Band plays Fri., Feb. 23, 9:30 p.m., $8, with Like a Fox and Pros from Dover, Johnny Brenda's, 1201 N. Frankford Ave., 215-739-9684, www.johnnybrendas.com.