For the past couple of years, Eternal Tapestry and Sun Araw have been gliding along parallel paths. The Portland-bred space-rock group and the Long Beach-based vibe merchant both skew toward the softer side of psychedelia, using primitivist improvisation and a palette of mellow sounds to generate potent new age zone-outs. Night Gallery, a 40-minute jam session recorded last year for Austin's KVRX FM, brings them together with unsurprisingly trippy results.
Tapestry's Dewey Mahood and Nick Bindeman take the lead, playing expansive guitar solos while Araw's Cameron Stallones supplies heady textures on flute and keyboard. The rhythm section, comprising drummer Jed Bindeman and bassist Yoni Kifle, mostly lays low. Night Gallery is still, slowly evolving music, where the perspective shifts gradually if at all. The performance has been edited into four suites, but it flows like a single, continuous piece. Imagine King Tubby crashing an all-night Crazy Horse rehearsal, or a mixtape compiled from a decade's worth of "Dark Star" bootlegs (which exists, actually).
While Eternal Tapestry and Sun Araw are of a similarly mystical bent, their methods differ. The former is a fairly traditional rock ensemble, complete with guitars, drums, and even the odd saxophone solo. Stallones' approach-- using cassette loops as a rhythmic foundation for lush and lightly funky guitar twiddling-- is less familiar. The music on his 2010 2xLP, On Patrol, sounded like it drifted in from a third-world sci-fi metropolis.
Night Gallery shifts back and forth between these two feels. With dense drones and wah-wah gurgles, "Night Gallery I" tilts heavily toward Sun Araw's dub-inflected territory. Nine minutes later, the burden shifts. On "Night Gallery II", he's a supporting player, slipping organ gurgles into Tapestry's tumbling rave-up. During the fourth and final suite, the group follows a steady organ pulse through 14-minutes of abstract doodles, refusing to congeal around a single melody for more than a few moments. It's either an admirable display of restraint or adequate evidence of inebriation, but the track excellently subverts space-rock clichés. The predictable part where everybody locks and hits the gas never arrives.
Eternal Tapestry and Sun Araw share an affinity for foggy-headed 1970s experimental outfits Cluster and Popol Vuh, but the performance on Night Gallery has a less sinister and more laid-back, ambling feel that's more in line with the Grateful Dead. There are bum notes, and rhythms that wander. But Eternal Tapestry and Sun Araw mesh well. When they hit a groove, they're a match made in a UV lamp-lit and sage-scented stoner-rock heaven.
