News

Howlin Rain Play Psychedelic Space Gallery

Howlin Rain singer/guitarist Ethan Miller and keyboardist Joel Robinow played an intimate acoustic set Thursday night, upstairs at the Space Gallery in San Francisco. The set was to celebrate the opening of Archaic Revival, a gallery show featuring psychedelic rock poster art by Stacie Willoughby, David D’Andrea, and Alan Forbes, which runs through the weekend.

Miller and Robinow played a short but inspired set of tunes – “Beneath Wild Wings”, “Ghost”, “Cherokee Werewolf”, and “Can’t Satisfy Me Now” from the band’s album currently in progress, which is being produced by Rick Rubin, as well as “Calling Lightning Pt. 2”, from Magnificent Fiend. The psych-soul outfit has a new EP, too — The Good Life — with cover art that is a collaboration between Forbes and D’Andrea.

Showgoers milled around the gallery, checking out work from these three premiere West Coast psychedelic poster artists. The Santa Cruz-based Willoughby is the in-house artist for concert promoter (((Folk Yeah))) – her work is often in magic marker and has a childlike quality, even as its images include nudes melting into rainbows or tripsters with bejeweled beards.

D’Andrea’s hand-silkscreened posters are largely nature-based, with fine line drawings of wildlife and foliage and cryptically psychedelic lettering. Some standouts were a large format Black Crowes poster with a skeleton and roses, and one for an OM and Six Organs of Admittance gig.

Like D’Andrea, Forbes showed his hand-drawn original work, along with full-size silkscreens. The trio art show’s iconic image comes from a poster Forbes did for an earlier poster show — a long-haired, hatted face composed of eyes and pentagrammatics, hovering over a mushroom patch with mean-looking ravens — the colors fading in from deep crimson to purple, in what screenprinters call “split fountain.”

Archaic Revival — the name is taken from a 1992 Terence McKenna book about psychedelics and mysticism — may hit the road next year. Watch for it.