Barn Owl

The music the California duo of Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras makes as Barn Owl gets described in many ways—frequently complimentary and, in their own manners, accurate. So it's not necessarily wrong to use rock-crit code—"doom" or "black drone" or "post-metal"—to convey what the pair has been doing with guitars and synths over the past half-decade. But, properly, there is but one way to account for the pair's relentless output: These dudes are jamming.

Though they might be young and reviewed (favorably, even) on Pitchfork Media, Barn Owl belong to the broader, older universe of free improvisers that splattered out of the jazz scene in the late 1960s and into the cosmos. In the celestial record bin, Caminiti and Porras are guys using the still-evolving language of guitars and electronics and who managed to find a few timely frameworks in their dark space vibes and occasional silvery acoustic flashes.

Recognizing each other as fellow longhairs in an American Indian Science class at San Francisco State University in 2005, the two bonded over ethno-botany and Hermann Hesse. Both had played in metal bands and were prone to quoting Japanese avant-garde composer Toru Takemitsu to describe what they wanted to achieve: to create the type of out-of-body music that bordered on outright meditation, a direct line from their fragmented noise to the spiritual harp jams of Alice Coltrane.

As Barn Owl, Caminiti and Porras have released nearly 10 albums. Last year's included Ancestral Star, their Thrill Jockey debut, as well as Headlands, a collaboration with drone instrument builder Ellen Fullman and her Infinite Strings Ensemble. Both Owls fly solo, too, most recently with Caminiti's When California Falls Into The Sea. That work explores new flight paths and other metaphors that keep his abstract improvised music vital. Thrill Jockey will issue Barn Owl's Shadowland EP in June. A new LP is due in the fall, just in time for Hopscotch. —Jesse Jarnow