Noot d’ Noot is some of the realest and rarest dance music around, all the way up to the established ATL big-boys, but you probably don’t know that. It ain’t all your fault, either, as Noot d' Noot doesn't necessarily burn up the road; so you may have missed whatever spare opportunities you’ve had to catch the group's immense and joyous jive and spiel. Save for an East Coast jaunt where they played, tellingly, an old-school R&B “convention” in Baltimore and made a few appearances in New York (original epicenter of the contagious, economic bounce that pulses at their freaky heart), they’ve only played outside hometown Atlanta a good few times.

Noot d' Noot

This avowed reluctance to travel, however, has benefited them - and us - in great ways: without the daunting exterior distraction of organization, finance and personnel that touring imposes on large groups, they remain free to hone their trip, organically produce and record new pieces and, generally, create and present their own scene to whomever is lucky enough to be around and partake. In this way, they’re like that favorite soulfood place of yours - the one hidden behind the dime-a-dozen stripmall: inexplicably unknown except to the nearby initiated, but a time-tested, completely homegrown and edifying experience nonetheless.

This carefully curated individualism becomes clear when first you lay eye and ear upon them. Imagine pressing up on this expansive 10-piece trip after the millionth minimal “raw garage-punk” pretender you’ve caught since South by Southwest: over the hypnotic jungle of timbales and congas and the spongy funk of the traditional rhythm section, there’s a crucial dude just owning a couple reverberant electric pianos and organs juiced through his God-sized delay box. Then the cat in the semi-decorative bathrobe and sunglasses betrays his well-aimed Fela Kuti fixation with his boss tenor sax. And then, as the guitarist culls the backward seagull-peals from his own delay-station, the dandelion-statured stoner with huge sneakers announces that his name is Dookie Platters and drops an indecipherable line about some kinda sticky shit. It’s then you notice the fine-ass soul sisters, who primp up to the mic and extemporize to tell you what it's like where they live, in Jiggle City, where we’ll all go to “chase the kitty.” That’s right, this shit is that spot-slam-on, Junior.

And it's like that, jam after jam, where a perfectly organic pop-intuition for the rhythm and groove coexist with a high quotient of Krautrock space-experimentalist attitude, à la Harmonia or La Düsseldorf, and is all burnished beautifully by a marble-mouthed sense of humor straight from the hella-stoned convenience store thief inside all of us. Noot performances occur inexorably in this highly intentional and cloud-minded mythological realm, where we all shake tail to the shimmery dance-psych vibe on their “goopher dust” to keep moving, mysteriously connect with complex and secret jokes through the silver druggists’ fog, and keep cool grins all the while.

The band’s ambivalence toward the typical indie-road-dawg existence has facilitated a recent rebirth of their old Shakedown Records label. “Years ago, we used the label to release our old bands’ stuff,” bassist/percussionist Bimbi Garraux says, “and we decided, with our situation, being a big band and all, touring not really being a reality, to focus our limited resources on putting out our new stuff ourselves.” Their newest release, he asserts, will appropriately be a “hybrid of a 12-inch dance single and a full-length” - a compact and high-energy half-hour outgrowth of the band’s own hybrid mutant-groove.

So, when you come to dig these joints at Farm 255, you might wanna come already half-cut, in comfy shoes and revealing clothes and all that - you know, the Saturday night protocol. But I also suggest you bring along something appropriate to sustain you through the miles-worth of goof-sexy strutting you’ll be moved toward, like a pocketful of Ecto-Cooler and some chicken wings, or some Syzurp and Tootsie-Rolls-mashed-in-Loveboat. Because as killer as those locally raised hamburgers truly are, digging this greasy real-raw Noot d' Noot with a gutful of fair-trade alfredo would feel big-time wrong, trust me. They’re playing with acid-house freak-beaters and fellow A-T-L-iens Judi Chicago, with whom they often share bills, and Bimbi told me some good news on the subject: “Whenever we play with them, we end up forming a huge band at the end of the night and jamming on some weird jams by Hawkwind or Prince. Its always righteous!” Will you be denied? Hotcha!

Jim McHugh