_{Photos by Invisible Hour}

Restraint is undervalued and underused. It’s exactly what makes bands like the Cave Singers and White Magic so appealing: the feeling that there’s as much behind the music as in it. Restraint is different from minimalism in the tension it creates, and that tension often results in a sense of darkness, of foreboding. That’s what White Magic was all about last night.

Mira Billotte sings like a possessed angel, with a vast range and ruddy, rich timbre, sounding equally ethereal and earthy. With Billotte on electric piano, backed with a bassist, drummer, and songwriting Doug Shaw on guitar and backing vocals, the overall sensation of White Magic is strangely supernatural, the sound of a midnight pagan ritual in a mist-shrouded forest. Part of the music’s restraint comes in repetition: Billotte’s keys and Shaw’s guitar fall in and out of phase, subtly hypnotizing until you realize you’ve been vexed or hexed or transfixed for an entire song. There’s a definite Silver Apples twist to this braiding of melodies, droning but shifting, organic but mechanical. The live setting also revealed a bit of the music’s latent barrelhouse/barroom swing.

The music is made for the outdoors, for firelight, for pine needles underfoot. White Magic just played the Fernwood Resort down in Big Sur, opening Citay’s album release celebration. That would’ve been a totally rad, ideal locale for the band. There or an old hall with gooey, liquid-oil projections squirming and dripping larger than life on a backdrop behind them. It’s mushroom music, no question, and it seemed to warp the cozy confines of Nectar (which sounded GREAT) into something a little less familiar and recognizable.

Like fellow quietmeisters Brightblack Morning Light, White Magic wasn’t much for stage presence. At least not at the beginning of the set, which was more a meditation than a rock show. Eventually a bottle of Jameson appeared and was passed around the stage and into the audience, where it and the mike were offered to some kid up front who told the room he came from Alaska to hear White Magic that night. The more the band hit the bottle—and it wasn’t manic, but it was steady—the looser they got.

Most of their songs came from the mesmerizing Dark Stars EP and Dat Rosa album, but a few new tunes were revealed, including an Afro-Latin jammer towards the end of the set that was nearly danceable. The further the set developed, the more reverb blasted the vocals into a weird, dubby innerspace, and “Winds,” from Dark Stars, was a full-blown space-shot. To end the set, Billotte stepped out from behind the keys with an empty Corona bottle—clearly not just a prop—and tapped in rhythm to another Afro-Latin/Afropop tune. It was upbeat, a departure from the drawn, dramatic seriousness of the rest of the set. If that kind of contrast hints at the band’s developing interests, there’s a lot more goodness to expect from White Magic.