Barn Owl should soar to transcendent heights at Glasslands and Shea Stadium this month
Sunday, September 11, Glasslands Gallery, 289 Kent Ave., $10, 8:30
Saturday, September 17, Shea Stadium, 20 Meadow St.
www.myspace.com/barnowlband
San Francisco psychedelic trance duo Barn Owl’s new album might be called Lost in the Glare (Thrill Jockey, September 13, 2011), but there’s nothing blinding about it. Instead, it’s a forty-two-minute journey through gorgeous, ambient dronescapes. Influenced by everything from Neil Young and Popul Vuh to black metal, Middle Eastern ragas, and experimental jazz — as well as the Bay Area’s ocean and fog — Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti guide listeners across a subtly mesmerizing cloudscape on a succession of guitars and synthesizers (and Farfisa organ), with Jacob Felix Heule on drums, Steve Dye on bass clarinet, and Michael Elrod adding tanpura, Roland Juno-60, and gong. The follow-up to last November’s full-length Ancestral Star and this June’s three-track EP, Shadowland, the new record features such slow-paced, layered mini-epics as “Turiya,” “Temple of the Winds,” and “Devotion II” that both soar into the transcendent and delve into the ominous. The centerpiece is “The Darkest Night Since 1683,” a seven-and-a-half-minute minimalist masterpiece that nearly explodes in the middle before heading off into more calming windswept terrain. Barn Owl, who never play a song the same way twice, will be at the Glasslands Gallery in Williamsburg on September 11 with Helado Negro and Jonti and at Shea Stadium in Bushwick on September 17 with Gunn-Truscinski Duo and Noveller.