Night Gallery
Eternal Tapestry and Sun Araw
The slow intro to an album or song—featuring, say, building distortion, light cymbal rolls, noodling guitars, maybe some sparse horn lines—is to rock music what an establishing shot is to film: a recognized way of establishing mood; something you may hear for only a few seconds, but that you’re meant to have it in mind as you listen to what comes after. Night Gallery has one of these intros. It just never cuts away from the establishing shot.

Eternal Tapestry and Sun Araw are two different bands linked in spirit by a taste for psychedelia and now linked on record through this 40-minute jam session played live on radio at last year’s SXSW festival. The lack of premeditation leads to a relatively conventional release. The album is as close in spirit if not sound to jam bands like Grateful Dead as it is to the noisier, more obscure, and less lively style that is found on Sun Araw’s 2010 work, On Patrol. Compared to that, Night Gallery certainly lies at the more traditional side of experimental music.

In fact, the analogy to establishing shots might be a bit misleading if you think that means nothing happens on the album. By the end of “Night Gallery II,” with wah-wah guitars and rolling organ lines in full effect, action and emotion are not exactly lacking. At that point, something is undoubtedly happening. The album is a success until it discards this building momentum by the three-quarter mark. The final song is a restart, a change in mood and landscape, and it forces the band to rebuild the energy it had already accumulated over Night Gallery’s first 25 minutes.

Night Gallery may be a bit out there for traditional rock, but it might also be the perfect gateway drug to send you into the weirder world of Sun Araw, Eternal Tapestry, and experimental music in general. Suddenly my analogy to establishing shot would prove more prescient than you ever could have thought.

Try it. First hit is free here.

WHERE’S YR CHILD V from miko revereza on Vimeo.