(This show preview originally appeared in the SF Weekly.)

The New England-based collective Sunburned Hand of the Man  is composed of psychedelic masters of the 20-minute hippie-fried communal jam. Their success is based on the fact that this large, often nebulous ensemble always retains the necessary mixture of the three types of musicians required to create incessantly mutating psych-grooves that are both open-ended like free jazz and tightly wound like hard-hitting rock ‘n’ roll. Type One: learned musicians who know their chops and prevent the collective jam from devolving into an amateurish “Hippie Hill” drum circle fiasco. Type Two: freaky, artistic nonmusicians that prevent the learned musicians from hijacking the collective jam and turning it into a Cream-inspired snooze-a-thon. Type Three: record nerds that inject the collective jam with riffs, rhythms, and sounds nicked from ultra-obscure platters that nobody in the group would have ever been able to create from scratch. When these three types are combined in the right way (which SHOTM have spent years learning how to do), powerful, stinky free-funk vibrations are generated. But don’t believe me, go attain direct knowledge when Sunburned Hand of the Man, along with Magik Markers, perform on Sunday, Aug. 28, at the Bottom of the Hill.