[or: "What Happens When a High School Club Achieves Sentience and Summons Its Members Across Space-Time"]
In the year 2000, a progressive acoustic group called AVAS released one album on Little King Records and vanished into the multiverse. Now, twenty-five years later, the quantum entanglement that bound these musicians has reached critical mass, creating a temporal anomaly that threatens to collapse the space-time continuum unless they reconvene and complete the sonic ritual they began at a Nashville high school decades ago.
Jay Sanders—last seen communicating with entities from the music of the spheres—has been pulled from his Tuesday night quantum residency. Jason Krekel materialized mid-letterpress print, his guitar still vibrating at frequencies that transcend the four-track cassette dimension. Andy Pond arrived via slamgrass wormhole, his banjo emitting comfortable reggae radiation. Gaines Post was extracted from the Blue Mountains of Australia, where he'd been writing science fiction novels that were actually encoded messages from his flute about the nature of reality itself.
Supporting this cosmically improbable reunion: Zack Page, whose 275-gigs-per-year averaged bass lines have created gravitational wells across multiple timelines. Will Boyd, whose soul sax tradition channels frequencies from the Great American Sunday Hymnal Dimension where spirituals become literal doorways to transcendence. And Alan Hall, the percussion philosopher whose forty years of alchemical drumming—converting kinetic energy into bridges between the earthbound and ethereal—have finally revealed their true purpose: reopening the AVAS gateway.
What happens when Bill Frisell meets Mahavishnu Orchestra meets Väsen meets Raymond Scott meets your high school music club twenty-five years later in a bar that exists simultaneously in Asheville and several adjacent dimensions? The answer may destroy conventional understanding of music, shatter the known capabilities of wooden flutes, recalibrate the fundamental constants of bluegrass physics, and prove conclusively that the Acoustic Vibration Appreciation Society was never about acoustic vibrations—but rather about engineering a self-sustaining tear in the fabric of musical reality itself.
What began as a student club has evolved into a living organism, a sentient musical algorithm that spans decades and continents, pulling its scattered members back together like cosmic debris orbiting an invisible singularity. This isn't nostalgia. This is the universe demanding completion of an unfinished equation written in sound waves and string theory.
Witness the AVAS Continuum. Watch out for aliens. Bring your third eye. The fundamental vibrations are calling, and they're not taking "I moved to Australia" as an excuse.
[WARNING: This performance may cause spontaneous appreciation of sacred geometry, involuntary understanding of the music of the spheres, and the sudden realization that your high school music club was actually a prophetic vision of the future. Side effects include: seeing sounds, hearing colors, believing that banjos might actually save the universe, and the unsettling certainty that newgrass was always meant to be a trans-dimensional technology. No refunds for dimensional displacement. Existential dread not included but highly probable.]
Featuring
Jason Krekel attended Jimmy Buffett concerts as a baby—strapped to his father Tim's back while dad played lead guitar—absorbing the songwriter, studio, and publishing scene of Nashville before he could even speak. When his father handed him a guitar at 14 with zero pressure attached, young Krekel took lessons with future collaborator Jay Sanders, played their first gig together in 11th grade, then headed to Boone for college where he dove headfirst into bluegrass, old-time, and whatever else...
When Andy Pond enrolled at Appalachian State University in Boone, his brother George and George's then-wife Caroline joined him to form Snake Oil Medicine Show, coining the term "slamgrass" for their colorful and kinetic update on old-time string music—soon inflecting it with deep pockets of jam-inspired groove, shades of rockabilly smoothness, and most famously, comfortable reggae rhythms. It was, as Caroline puts it, "the perfect thing for us to do, to move to North Carolina, to be in the...
The house in Orangeburg, South Carolina, was a frequency spectrum unto itself. The Isley Brothers and the Manhattan Transfer and Dolly Parton and Mozart — all of it moving through the same rooms, all of it landing in the ears of a kid from Queens, New York, who had been transplanted to the Lowcountry and was trying to figure out which signal to lock onto. His mother had graduated from Jamaica High School of the Performing Arts, and she made sure Will and his siblings sang. Gospel was the...
On their twelfth Christmas, Pete Page gave one son a guitar and the other a bass. The old man loved Booker T. & the M.G.'s and worshipped Duck Dunn, and he had a theory that every good band needs a good bass man. He wasn't wrong. Andy got the guitar. Zack — four minutes younger, identical in face, opposite in instrument — got the bass. Their mother came from the McGhees of Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, a family whose old-time music roots run back generations through the Appalachian soil....
Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Gaines Post was part of the original high school student club that became AVAS (The Acoustic Vibration Appreciation Society), reuniting with Jay Sanders and mandolinist Jason Krekel when the group reformed as a progressive acoustic ensemble that later expanded to include violinist Cailin Campbell and banjo player Andy Pond. The group released their self-titled debut on Little King Records in 2000, featuring original compositions that blended newgrass...
Jay Sanders grew up in Nashville, which means he grew up understanding that music is labor — that behind every song on the radio is a session player who showed up on time, read the chart, and made someone else's vision real. But the Nashville that shaped Sanders wasn't the one on Broadway. It was the one in practice rooms and living rooms where Reggie Wooten talked about fundamental vibration and sacred geometry and the Music of the Spheres, where the instrument became a doorway into...
Before Alan Hall played his first drum lesson, he played concerts. He and his sister would turn on the radio and perform for the neighborhood kids in San Jose — no instruments, no training, just the instinct that sound was meant to be shared and that sharing it required an audience. His mother was a pianist who sang and taught. His grandparents were Spanish dancers on the vaudeville circuit. His father's father wrote pop songs. The family had been in the business of moving people's bodies for...
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