Wednesday, Feb. 23: Arbouretum

Northern

By Jason Baxter on February 16, 2011

Time to break your wizard bong out of storage: Wednesday's show at Northern promises to be intensely psychedelic. Arbouretum are set to perform with Oregonian jammers Eternal Tapestry, their comrades on a brief West Coast tour that's bringing both bands' gargantuan riffing and hypnotic arrangements to eager ears from SoCal to Seattle. Arbouretum - the quartet of Corey Allender, Matthew Pierce, Buck Carey, and songwriter/guitarist Dave Heumann - make music that's simultaneously intellectual and intoxicating. Heumann's lyrics are inspired by heady sources like Gnostic philosophy and Carl Jung's hallucinogenic confessional Red Book, and contain third-eye-opening lines like "Take me out beyond the barriers of what is said is done" from "Destroying to Save," the third song on The Gathering, the Baltimore band's fifth studio album. 

[Northern, with Eleanor Murray, Endless Boogie, 8 p.m., all-ages, 321 Fourth Ave., Olympia, northernolympia.org]