While I was at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas last month, there were many new bands to admire. Among my favorites was The Sunshine Factory. I walked out of a Mexican restaurant on the Saturday night of the festival and under an adjacent white tent surrounded by late dusk and thick with clouds of psychedelic trance rock, and a couple dozen people slowly swaying, taking it in, letting things happen. On the stage was a guitarist/singer and a bassist. In front of the bassist was a computer. Add some pedals, and that was the band. That, plus laserlike effects from the stage and low-tech psychedelic lighting. The music sounded like what would be written if Radiohead and Depeche Mode got high under a blacklit poster of The Smiths: sensitive and curated, hard-working and lovingly skilled, translucent and gently transporting.

Someday perhaps I will narrate some part of the tale of the total experience that being engulfed in their music meant for me. But for now, I am thinking of their song “Deeper Look,” that I first heard that night.

“time to take / a deeper look
time to look inside the world of me
time to take / a deeper look
I need to see / what’s left to understand
How the world has changed me
Love has scarred and shaped me
understand the reasons
for the locks on all the doors”

As if for the first time, I realized, with pleasure, how and why music can become religion, spirituality, or

(more…)