Eternal Tapestry. Thursday, Sept. 11

[September 10th, 2008]

[FREE-FORM PSYCH ROCK] At last year’s Halleluwah festival, Eternal Tapestry was five members strong, with amps and bodies draped in colorful fabric and music that shifted between twinkling space ragas and the fuzzy shudder of pure psychedelia. In the year since that masterful set, the group has stripped down to two guitars and drums—all churning out molten psych rock manifested directly from the band’s collective id.

“[Our sound] has evolved a lot since we got together,” says guitarist Nick Bindeman, sitting in a rickety lawn chair in the backyard of his shared North Portland home. “But it’s pretty solid right now.”

In those three years, Bindeman and fellow guitarist Dewey Mahood have carried ET through numerous lineup changes and shepherded its sound through an equal amount of variation. “It started off very rock-focused,” remembers Bindeman, “and it slowly became more abstract and experimental, and we were writing long pieces with small percussion and a lot of looping.”

These days, the group (which also features Nick’s brother Jed on drums) is a strictly improvisational outfit, recording its free-range jams in Nick’s basement and then trimming them down for release, including its most recent long-player, a self-titled, vinyl-only release out on the L.A.-based Not Not Fun label.

The album showcases the band’s evolving spirit over two sidelong cuts: One is the core trio playing a hypnotic jam with sinuous interplay between its two guitarists; the other is a simmering drone featuring spectral vocals by former member Janina Angel Bath.

The band is especially taken with the album’s slow-burning A side, which came out of a recording/rehearsal session not long after the group became a trio. “It had a lot more energy and was really ecstatic-sounding because the band was changing,” Jed says. The album certainly bears that out, with the players locked into a trance-like groove that feels as liquid and slippery as it does forceful.

Those are the kind of adjectives one uses to describe Eternal Tapestry’s sound, one that Nick says grows stronger as the trio coalesces. “With three people it’s so much easier to not get uptight and critical about taking risks. Now, we’re rooted within each other. We speak the same language.”