Lightning Bolt gets a real charge out of following its own path

The band Lightning Bolt is hard to contact. Not because the pair -- bassist Brian Gibson and drummer Brian Chippendale -- disdain the press. They've just been busy.

"I got one e-mail from you and then it disappeared into the pile," wrote Chippendale, 33, after about a month of requests. His reply was sent at 3 a.m. "As you can see if you check this e-mail . . . I am a stay-up-late-sleep-late type."

The Providence-based pair -- the Velvet Underground of the late Fort Thunder art, comic, and music collective that Chippendale, Gibson, and other artists helped create -- has a growing fan base as it continues to make "horrible noise you can legitimately say you enjoy," according to LA Weekly. Some have said the band plays music meant to accompany a brewing storm. Others call it noise rock. Still, that doesn't cover it.

Regardless, the duo hits the Massachusetts College of Art for a rare matinee show tomorrow. Bring your earplugs. Fans have been known to rip up dollar bills and stuff them in their ears during shows.

"It's at an interesting point," Chippendale said of the band, which played its first show in 1994. "I think we've really been having fun. I think because we've been doing all these side projects, it's a place to really be free. . . . I would say we're just recharging our batteries."

With the release last year of its latest album, "Hypermagic Mountain," well past, Lightning Bolt shows are rare treats for noise aficionados. Since the band's 1997 self-titled debut, it has been difficult to find out about a Bolt show via mainstream sources. Show dates were broadcast by word of mouth, through obscure Web discussion groups, or by cryptic posters that never spelled out the concert's address for fear of being busted in what was usually an empty Providence warehouse. To further go against the norm, the band tours before an album comes out on Providence's Load Records and stays put once it's released.

Chippendale plays a frenetic form of drums, wearing masks he makes himself and speaking, singing, or screaming into a crackling telephone mouthpiece sewn into the masks. His chops are fast and supremely skilled, and he plays hard, using Zildjian Absolute Rock drumsticks, which can be compared to small logs. Despite their girth, Chippendale still breaks several pairs during a concert or practice session. He and Gibson are backed by a stack of amps putting out 3,800 watts. The pair's hearing has eroded during the band's life, so much so that the protective headphones Chippendale once disdained are almost mandatory.

In the past, Gibson's bass has been tuned like a cello, its fifth string replaced with a banjo string that punctuates the band's unique exploding and imploding cinematic sound, which bubbles up below the chest-thumping thunder.

At concerts, the band skips the stage and instead plays in the middle of a throng -- an experience Chippendale says charges the band and draws out their performance, the audience just inches away, thrown into ecstatic seizures, knocking over cymbals that Chippendale replaces himself, often without missing a beat.

The band's growing popularity hasn't changed things, but Chippendale 's and Gibson's side projects have. Chippendale, an accomplished artist, has had well-received shows from New York to Los Angeles. A collection of his popular "Ninja" comics has been published in a gigantic tome that is getting rave reviews. He also has several music-related side projects and remains devoted to the Providence community and its artistic scene. Gibson is a skilled animator working on a second episode of his "Barkley's Barnyard Critters," about "rocker dog" Barkley and his band of animal friends. A DVD of the cartoon is available via Load Records.

The cartoon has a unique appearance, melding hand-drawn animation, 3-D animation, and live-action characters to bring the story to life. In the latest episode, Barkley quits the band and embarks on a drunken voyage of discovery while the record label head tries to replace him. ("Barkley's," obviously, is more late-night Cartoon Network than early-morning PBS Kids.)

Chippendale says there's no chance of such a breakup happening to the Bolt, with Chippendale and Gibson still living in Providence, "a parking lot apart," and practicing so much that at the MassArt show, and at a Sunday show at Providence's AS220 with Japan's Afrirampo, they expect to play all new material.

Just after the band's first show in December 1994, Chippendale, then at the Rhode Island School of Design, moved into an old Providence mill building dubbed Fort Thunder in that town's Olneyville section.

His roommates included cartoonist Brian Ralph and Matt Brinkman of the art collective Forcefield. Their movement grew so organically and powerfully that four members had their art featured in the Whitney Biennial 2002 . The artists concealed the dilapidated walls with sculptures and silk-screens and threw raging parties "all the time," says Gibson. With little proximity to other ears, bands could play beyond loud. Enter Lightning Bolt.

But gentrification soon came knocking. By the time Fort Thunder was demolished in 2001 to make way for -- irony of ironies -- a shopping center, it had created a small movement synonymous with experimentation among Providence's artistic community. Lightning Bolt is a surviving symbol of that vibrant space and time -- the antithesis of mass culture and corporate influence.

"I don't think it's ever going to happen," Gibson said about Lightning Bolt garnering widespread mainstream success. "You have to make certain deliberate decisions to get to that point."

Globe correspondent Sheela Raman contributed to this report.