Spacemen 3 veteran Sonic Boom–Peter Kember to his mum–may have stopped releasing rock records on a regular basis, but he certainly hasn’t retreated. He divides most of his attention between two ongoing concerns: New Atlantis Studios, where he produces and mixes groups like Dean & Britta and keeps his enviable arsenal of vintage synths and esoteric noisemakers, and the band-slash-solo project Experimental Audio Research (E.A.R.), which has at points featured Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine and Eddie Prevost of AMM. The most recent E.A.R. full-length, a solo affair from 2005 called Worn to a Shadow, consists of four long tracks of hallucinatory synth pulses that arrive in endlessly obsessive permutations. When you listen to this stuff on record it almost sounds arbitrary, like footage of animals on the African savanna that just happened to pass by a camera, but live it’s clear that Kember is an occultist leading some delirious rite dedicated to the worship of the almighty tone. And if past Sonic Boom shows are any indication, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear him dip into his back catalog while he’s at it. Dreamend opens. a 9 PM, Lakeshore Theater, 3175 N. Broadway, 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401, $12, $10 in advance. A
