By Paul Robicheau

Free from the stress of leading a major-label band on the road, Mark Sandman could always return home to Hypnosonics, an alternate vehicle for his elastic vision.

Mark Sandman in 1998. Photo: Paul Robicheau.

Mark Sandman would say “rehearsal is death.” The mercurial, laid-back Sandman preferred to make music more spontaneously with several bands that frequented the Cambridge clubs. The singer/multi-instrumentalist garnered his widest notoriety in two of those outfits, Treat Her Right and especially Morphine, the low-rock trio that was onstage in Italy when he collapsed and died of a heart attack in 1999.

Still, it shouldn’t be surprising that Sandman’s longest-running group was the one he took casually, his “secret” side band for 13 years. Hypnosonics began as an ad-hoc combo that came to anchor his Subsonic Revue at the Plough and Stars in the mid-’80s and expanded into a six-piece band that played its last gig at the Lizard Lounge just two weeks before Sandman’s passing at age 46.

The mysterious Hypnosonics have been largely lost to time until the release of twin albums Someone Stole My Shoes: Beyond the Q Division Sessions and Drums Were Beating: Fort Apache Studios 1996. The first set features seven studio tracks from 1989 plus two tunes from a WFNX lunchtime show at Fort Apache, mined further on the second release. They mark the band’s first full recordings, though a few of these songs appeared on the 2004 box set Sandbox: The Music of Mark Sandman.

Between the new albums there’s some repetition, with four songs repeated. Studio and live versions of “Rub It In” and “Early Man” bookend Someone Stole My Shoes, though the live tracks — not surprisingly — breathe more. Studio opener “Rub It In” gives a spaciousness to Mike Rivard’s sharply thumbed bass and Tom Halter’s echoey trumpet shots, but Hypnosonics truly cut their teeth onstage and the live record is clearly recorded as well.

Hypnosonics at the Green Street Grill in 1993. Photo: Dennis Stein.

The group laid grooves like a minimalist funk revue, a rhythmic bed nodding to both James Brown and Miles Davis beneath Sandman’s quirky, melodic refrains. Some numbers stretch for several minutes, the more intoxicating ones including the dreamy, driving “Like a Damn Fool” at Fort Apache and the stealthy title track of Someone Stole My Shoes, both goosed up by call-and-response vocals from the crack horn section. Tenor/soprano saxman Russ Gershon was the first recruit in that crew, joined by his Either/Orchestra accomplice Halter, before Morphine baritone saxophonist Dana Colley came aboard in time for the Fort Apache gig.

While Sandman was known for playing two-string slide bass in Morphine, he stuck to sporadically spectral guitar and keyboards in Hypnosonics, leaving Rivard (who founded jazz/dub/Moroccan collective Club d’elf in 1998) to weave sinuous bass lines. But the defining anchor of Hypnosonics became the choppy, incessant beats of Jay Hilt or the original Morphine drummer Jerome Deupree, who replaced Hilt for a few years, including the 1989 Q Division date. Sandman didn’t inject an oddity like his slide bass but, true to his penchant for stripped-down sounds, he urged Hilt to play a piece of wood rather than a ride cymbal, lending clacking counter patterns that are neatly isolated in the right channel of the Fort Apache mix.

But on these records, Hypnosonics offer more than odd, jazzy funk jams. With his catchy basso cadences, Sandman spins outright earworms in tunes like “Rub It In” and the near-rapped “Insomniac.” His dry wit slides into stylistic parody in “Born Again,” a country two-step where he sings “I hope I don’t get born again, ’cause one time was enough” to gang refrains before the horns break down into New Orleans–style polyphony. It seems that the group served as Sandman’s laboratory: the Fort Apache set opens with the drawling send-up “French Fries with Pepper,” which Morphine refined for its album Like Swimming a year later.

A double album might have been too much to introduce an obscure side band, mainly known by the Boston faithful who happened to catch Hypnosonics along the way. So, which one of these releases best captures Sandman’s pet project?

One might be tempted to lean to the live Drums Were Beating, whose title track also captivates as an ominous, sonically tweaked march, although it’s a shame that two tracks from Fort Apache were tacked onto Someone Stole My Shoes instead.

That mostly studio set also boasts the best song of the bunch: the soulful, slinky “They Bent Me.” In it, Sandman picks a brittle, African-style guitar melody sharply reflected by the horns. “They bent me pretty bad,” he sings, his ruminations turning to exhortation. “They can only bend me. They can never break me!”

Free from the stress of leading a major-label band on the road, Sandman could always return home to Hypnosonics, an alternate vehicle for his elastic vision.

Paul Robicheau served more than 20 years as contributing editor for music at the Improper Bostonian in addition to writing and photography for the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He was also the founding arts editor of Boston Metro.