Time to break your wizard bong out of storage: The Wednesday, Feb. 23 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.

"Songs will tend to come from certain philosophical perspectives," Heumann explains. While he's quick to point out that The Gathering is not a concept album, Heumann admits that Jung's writings on "inner transformation" (the idea "that someone could have experiences that would reinvigorate themselves") helped inform the record's abundance of nourishing, lysergic sentiments and sounds.

The Gathering differentiates itself from previous Arbouretum long-players by shuttling Pierce from guitar to keyboards, allowing Heumann's noodlings more room to explore a bevy of sundry influences.

"At certain points, I was going for a style that was somewhere between these African guitarists that I've heard lately like Group Inare," says Heumann, "and psychedelic styles like Jerry Garcia or more ‘rock-y' kind of styles like Jimi Hendrix."

The Gathering's uncluttered sonic real estate and shuffle of instrumental duties also granted Pierce the opportunity to throw down on a mouth-watering spread of vintage synthesizers - Arps, Junos, Rhodes, Moogs, you name it. Similarly, Eternal Tapestry guitarist Dewey Mahood says that their latest, Beyond the 4th Door, is "pretty heavy on synth and new textures that we've never really used before." 

Beyond the 4th Door is a departure from the dirge-y Stoner Rock of Eternal Tapestry's prior works - "something more serene and melodic and laid-back in general," as Mahood puts it. While Eternal Tapestry are wholly instrumental, improvisational sonic healers, the potency of their aural bliss-outs is easily comparable to that of Arbourteum's more composed and premeditated sounds.

"With our music in general, it's almost like fantastic music. It's not pop music, it's not a narrative in a traditional sense ... (it's all about) creating a sensation, something unusual," Mahood says. Theirs is the sound of the titular door unlocking - the sharing of psychedelic secrets and the exploration of previously unimagined realms - beyond the barriers, as it were.

The bands differ crucially, however, when it comes to the production of their records. Eternal Tapestry practice and record exclusively in a home studio where band members Ryan Carlile (saxophone, synth) and Jed Bindeman (drums) live, whereas Arbouretum recorded The Gathering at New York's Vacation Island Studios with Producer Supreme Matt Boynton (Boynton's résumé is ridiculously impressive: Gang Gang Dance's Saint Dymphna, Bat for Lashes' Two Suns and Arbouretum's 2007 LP Rites of Uncovering).

Arbouretum have far-reaching plans for their new, Boynton-produced epic. Following their West Coast jaunt with Eternal Tapestry, they'll be playing months of dates in Europe. Until Eternal Tapestry hits that continent in the fall, Mahood will keep busy with his handful of side projects, including Plankton Wat and Dub excursion Edibles (the latter has a full-length on the way this year from DNT tapes, and the similarly dubby Sun Araw will be guesting on a collaborative Eternal Tapestry LP also due out in 2011). Given Mahood's prolific-ness and continuing brilliance, I wonder if he's tapped into some mystical fount of cosmic inspiration. When asked, "What is ‘beyond the 4th door?'" he replies, "Our music (is) supposed to take you somewhere else, not physically, but mentally, and spiritually - leaving this world for your imagination."

[Northern, Arbouretum, Eternal Tapestry, Eleanor Murray, Endless Boogie, Wednesday, Feb. 23, 8 p.m., all-ages, 321 Fourth Ave., Olympia, northernolympia.org]