The Disappearing Man. Press Release November 2008 After abruptly parting from Ezra Furman & the Harpoons in May of 2008 after two years of strange and glorious bouts of conquest and rock and roll, nearly 200 shows in cities coast to coast and after witnessing the kidnapping and tardy return of his beloved pet goose, it is commonly thought that the Harpoons’s former guitarist Jahn Sood simply disappeared. Immediately following the discomforting incident when all of Sood’s belongings were found abandoned in a public restroom in Lexington, Kentucky, the Harpoons drummer Adam Abrutyn and their steadfast manager Mitch Marlow began an investigation into their former compatriot’s whereabouts. His location was not ascertained until several months later when the Harpoons received a mysterious letter from San Marcos, Guatemala, a city wedged in the mountains just south of the Mexican-Guatemalan border. This letter served to inform Ezra and his motley bunch that Sood had not in fact disappeared in the scientific sense but had fled the country with the law and all of his other ghosts behind him. The document received at that time also included a series of complicated technical drawings describing the apparatuses used to play his role in the Harpoons. These cryptic diagrams were then used to pass the torch of “first mate” aboard the mighty ship of rock and roll to Redwalls’ guitarist Andrew Langer who played Sood’s parts on the Harpoons second Minty Fresh album "Inside the Human Body." Now, several months after his perplexing flight from under the lights, Sood has returned with a new prerogative. He has taken it upon himself to revitalize the lost world of the Great American Circus. In the spring of 2008 he will release The Disappearing Man & other Sad Songs, an album and Folk Opera set in the old days of circus. This project involves a full-length play and series of songs about the circus. As much a reflection on Sood’s experience on tour with the Harpoons as a study in the act of fanfare, this is piece is thought to be a piercing and thought provoking new kind of art. Drawing comparisons to artists as diverse as Bertold Brecht, Tom Waits, Leonoid Andreyev, Bob Dylan and Man Man, Sood’s writing looks face to face with doom and stands defiant towards anything less. The Folk Opera, the complete version of “The Disappearing Man,” will premier in Inman Square in Cambridge, MA February 2009. While geographically Inman Square only covers a few blocks of the greater Bostonian sprawl, with residents including Apollo Sunshine, Drug Rug, Tulsa and Ezra Furman & the Harpoons and now, The Disappearing Man, it is quickly becoming the center point of Independent art and music in all of the city. The premier showing of the Disappearing Man will be a collaborative effort between many types of artists from the area including a director and a cast of actors from The American Repertory Theater at Harvard, an all-star band of Inman musicians and Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching band an 11-piece brass band that specializes in circus and gypsy music and that travels with a grotesque mix of freak show acts. The showing of entire opera with all the appropriate fanfare will mark the beginning of a new project, a new identity both for its composer and for the Inman Square art scene, which will finally be united in its full glory. The tour and CD release that follow will then bring our story and enthusiasm for creating art to a national audience. As for now, Jahn Sood has become “The Disappearing Man.”