Barn Owl (SF)
Pillars and Tongues (Chicago)
Numinous Eye (SF)
Barn Owl
"Unlike Brian Eno's electronics-based tone poems, Barn Owl's West Coast drone is distinctly earthy. It's Metal Machine Music from the organic aisle, with smoky landscapes of guitar and vocals hovering in heated sustain. Though layered effects overlap, the overall sound still bears the imprint of guitar strings, in keeping with predecessors like Charlambides, as well as heavier hitters like Om. The duo is obviously interested in space, but they also have a natural sense of drama, something left over, perhaps, from their metal days. When a loose drum beat emerges after three hazy tracks of their handsomely designed LP, From Our Mouths a Perpetual Light (vinyl on Not Not Fun; CD forthcoming from Digitalis), there's a sudden focusing effect; when a gigantic guitar chord thunders from out of nowhere a few seconds later, it's seismic. A clear-eyed frieze of acoustic guitar takes on extra potency within the duo's minimalist architecture." -Max Goldberg, SF Guardian
www.myspace.com/barnowlband
Pillars and Tongues is a trio born in Chicago, Illinois, but manifesting at many points on the map. The group of Evan Hydzik, Elizabeth Remis, and Mark Trecka constitute a collective focused on the abstraction of form and language, and their resulting exploration of such just happens to take shape in musical form. Recalling the aesthetic employed by the 'spiritual jazz' workouts of icons such as Pharaoh Sanders, in which the creation of music itself can be seen as a positing method to address larger concepts at hand, Pillars & Tongues utilize an organic, 'spontaneous composition' design in which the three communicate their ideas. The result is not so much a 'free music,' but rather an unfolding musical discussion that, like a logical conclusion to a question of study, moves towards organization and resolution. www.contraphonic.com
Numinous Eye is a guitar-drum duo formed by guitarist Mason Jones (ex-SubArachnoid Space, owner of the Charnel Music label). The project's drum seat is occupied by a rotating cast of players, which has included Mike Shoun (Oh Sees, ex-Caesura), Frank Grau (ex-Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Species Being), Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins), and others. Numinous Eye's music spans the range from spacey to gravitational, sometimes like floating motes, more often dense walls of sound. They've released several CDs and LPs on labels like Archive Records and Little Mafia, along with a number of self-issued CDRs. www.charnel.com/numinouseye
Cost: $6-10