BY JENNIFER KELLY

The super trippy Black Moth Super Rainbow makes an otherworldly sound, its songs bulging with synthesizer flourishes, filtered through a robot-esque vocoder, paced by pounding, syncopated drum and bass. Natural images float by, though viewed through prism lenses and rainbow clouds. Suns are always rising, flowers blooming, yet the colors are brighter than normal, the sounds sleeker and more plasticine. Listening to 2007's Dandelion Gum or this year's Eating Us, it's hard to envision exactly how a band - a bunch of regular people - would elicit these tones and melodies. What exactly do "Bubblegum Animals"' look like? What flavor is your "Lollipopsichord"?  

A live performance, though, this past August 27 at the Iron Horse in Northampton, Mass., did little to dispel the mystery.

Voice-altered singer Tobacco huddled in the rear of the room, near a makeshift movie screen projecting disturbing imagery from horror movies. Lanky Father Hummingbird set up camp on the floor to the right of the stage, pumping glossy swells of polysynth sound from a keyboard and occasionally stepping up to play a little bass. Drummer D. Kyler rattled rapid snare-shot breakbeat rhythms from behind her kit. And the Seven Fields of Aphelion smiled beatifically from behind her keyboard, salaaming in thanks for applause. The tunes were made flesh - and yet not - remaining as untouchably strange and ebullient as the first time you heard them out of a stereo.

But first the opening band. Black Moth Super Rainbow was travelling this tour with a NYC band called Soundpool, a five piece that set up as people filtered into the room. (It takes a long time to get into the venue, because of a changeover from an early show with Buffalo Springfield vet Richie Furay.)  Soundpool, like BMSR, deals in dream-like textures and atmospheres, Kim Field singing high and pure above a very odd mix of space-y, shoegaze-y guitars and hard funk bass and drums. Her partner, and the band's co-founder, John Ceparano, holds down the left side of the stage, stomping on pedals, bending into the speaker for feedback and working the whammy bar at blur speed. On the right hand side, Dean McCormick stalks and bobs, his bass pulsing somewhere between funk and disco, while Mark Robinson coaxes eerie wails of synthesizer out of a Nord 2 set up. And in the back, James Renard lays down a heavy, uncompromising beat, the anchor to all those airy clouds of sound.

The sound mix is not quite right, making it difficult to hear the vocals well, or discern lyrics. You get a vague sense of airy lyricism over thumping bass and space raider synthesizers in "Do What You Love," early on, but only a shard or two of the "Do you..." chorus. "Wide Awake in Dreamland" starts with a hard, drum-beat, its austerity soon swathed in diffuse clouds of synthesizer and eerie guitar effects.  "The Divides of March", the big song off Dichotomies and Dreamland, turns from diva pop into an extended kraut-ish jam; near the end, "Butterflies," also coming late, takes a quiet-storm soul tack, building chilled keyboards and wah-wah guitars into its slow burn.  You finish, not quite sold, but wanting to hear more.

Black Moth Super Rainbow works with video accompaniment, projected onto a bedsheet, and in fact, they start with just a video, a self-deprecating piece where a blogger type makes fun of their long name and calls them one of the five worst bands working today. (We never find out who the other four are.)  It's all tongue in cheek, and followed by another expert in hipster glasses who recommends that they change their name to Black Rainbows featuring Super Moth. (Funny image of Super Moth, a fat kid in dreads.)  Okay, it is a long name, and sometimes I get mixed up and say Black Super Moth Rainbow, but enough's enough, let's get to the show. And finally, they do.

It all starts with a hard funky beat, a percussive underpinning that is harder, sharper, dryer and more prominent than in BMSR's synth-swaddled, hippy fluted CDs. The bass, too, is leaning more toward Motown than Paisley Underground, a thudding, undulating foundation for pastel washes of synth. The band plays a good bit of Dandelion Gum as well as the janglier, more 1960s-guitar centric Eating Us, with the bass player sometimes moving to guitar, and Father Hummingbird clambering up onto the main stage to pick up the bass. The video show continues throughout, juxtaposing often very disturbing images - fruit decaying, a man whose hands have turned to skeleton bones, dismemberment - with breezy lyrics about sun and butterflies.

There is a surge of excitement at the first crystalline synths of "Sun Lips," a murmur of approval at the strident "Woo!" "Woo!" of synths at the opening to "Lollipsichord." Tobacco, the band's reclusive songwriter, remains obscured at the back of the stage, hunched over a pink microphone, whispering psychedelic lyrics through the vocoder. There's a modal folky inevitability to many of these melodies, which twine up and down scales in flowery bursts. Yet what seems trippy and bucolic in recordings turns into kraut-leaning jam onstage, hard beats driving, bass thudding through cuts like "Melt Me". A boy in a fedora is executing complicated nearly choreographed shimmies of arms and torso down in front; around him, a seething mass of arms and heads sway in time. BMSR's head music has turned, somehow, into body music.  

There is a very brief interval between main show and encore, as Apelion flips through her sheet music, and then the Beatlesque keys, the funk-syncopated drums, the slicked swells of synthesizers of "Born on a Day the Sun Didn't Rise" ensues.  You're still not sure how they do it, even standing right in front of the band, but BSMR has linked hippie naturalism with robot synthetics, dreamy folk with funky breakbeats, self-effacing musicianship with baroque video images without letting any of the seams show.