The Ascent of Everest
It’s a springtime Sunday night at The Cobra, and Bowling Green, Ky., psychedelic band Astronomy Club takes the stage. A projected design made from food coloring, water and colored filters flows over the musicians, spilling on the wall behind. The colored patterns come to life and begin to dance as the band lets loose a barrage of driving beats and dreamy, shimmering chords. It doesn’t feel like we’re in an East Nashville dive bar anymore. Welcome to Sunday Psych Night, a monthly gathering hosted by Nashville Psych Alliance.
The Alliance was born in July 2016, the brainchild of John Condit and husband and wife Trent and Anna Houghton, three friends united by a love of psychedelic music who met as students at Belmont nearly a decade ago. They’re participants in local music themselves: Condit fronts The Inscape and plays guitar with Lilly Hiatt, and the Houghtons run the liquid-light show Silver Cord Cinema. Tired of struggling to keep up with the activities (and websites, and social media profiles, and individual calendars) of like-minded friends and associates, the trio started a website, nashvillepsychalliance.com, to keep the relevant details in one convenient place.
In short order, they accumulated a database of bands with brief but detailed biographies and links to hear their music; a cadre of photographers, graphic and lighting designers and audio engineers who are familiar faces on the scene; venues that frequently book shows they like; and a concert calendar. Recurring features on the site include artists of the month, bands of the week, “flashback” posts with pictures and reviews of recent concerts, as well as a “$10 Trip,” where they recommend two psych-centric shows whose cover is $5.
“Nashville’s growing so exponentially that with more people coming in town, more egos can come into town as well,” says Condit. “What I really loved when I first moved here was how even if they did different styles of music, people still hung out, and the scene was still very small and very friendly. So we’re really just trying to do that.”
If you your tastes tend toward the psychedelic — as broad and fluid a definition as “psychedelic music” can have, from the fuzzy and jangly to the heavy and droning and so much in between — it’s a quick way to find new bands to follow and new places to hang out. And if you’re in a band that has some psychedelic flavor, the site offers a convenient starting place if you’re looking for people to play with, places to play and people who are likely to be on your wavelength and can help you do all the non-music stuff your band needs to do. That’s pretty useful in a town brimming with people who are trying to start and maintain music careers.
“All the bands are fighting for the same goal, right?” Anna Houghton says. “We’re all climbing the same wall. We can climb it together.”
![]That’s how Sunday Psych Night came to be. In the winter — following the tragic Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, Calif., and the nationwide wave of DIY venue closures that came after — there were suddenly fewer places for up-and-coming bands to play. The Nashville alliance responded by starting the monthly Sunday series to help keep the psych scene in motion. From January through April, they organized bills on the last Sunday night of each month that brought together two or three local groups with at least one touring act.
“It’s funny — when we set out on this, we never intended to be promoters,” Trent Houghton says. “We were getting such an influx of people touring. Almost every day, we get emails from bands wanting us to put on a show.”
After a two-month break, Sunday Psych Night returns on July 30. Atlanta’s Reverends headline — they have a heavy, often ominous take on psych that mixes in lots of shoegaze. Think The Black Angels plus Spiritualized, and you’re getting warm. Local support comes courtesy of post-rock stalwarts Ascent of Everest, whose latest work turns their wide-angle soundscapes toward dark space-rock riffage, and Future DZ, who’ve channeled their experience as electronic krautrock connoisseurs into producing delightfully disorienting dance music.
The show is a heartening reminder of the diversity that exists even within one subgenre, and how artists can stretch the boundaries of a style and carry it into the future.
Email music@nashvillescene.com
