Friday, March 6
TPP Events presents Satori Tree, w/ Nancy Druid
The Eighth State Brewing Company,
400 Augusta St., Greenville
8 p.m.
Free

When the Spartanburg trio Satori Tree began recording last year, they didn’t really intend to make “Labyrinth,” their just-released EP. All they were trying to do was get some local clubs to give them a listen. “The point of this originally was just to make a demo to show the venues that we wanted to play at that we were around,” says drummer Kolby Carrouth. “And it sort of became a full-fledged album for us.” It’s also a damn good collection of songs, showing a startling stylistic range within just a handful of tracks. The band, which also includes bassist Noah Lytle and singer/guitarist Justus Rollins, starts off with some catchy funk-pop (the loose-limbed, laid-back “Street Cat”) and then moves into increasingly experimental territory, working in blurry dream-rock (“The Dawn Divides”), a moody soundscape (the title track) and a hypnotic goth-soul ballad (“Fabricate”) before closing with an extended, psychedelia-infused jam (“Desolation Angels”). “We wanted it to be something that was going to display everything we had to offer,” Carrouth says. “That’s why it sounds so different from front to back.” And while they’re certainly interested in playing more shows, that’s not the end goal for Satori Tree; they’re after something that’s harder to define. “It’s more about sharing this moment with us,” Carrouth says, “sharing this sense of community and creating art in the moment and being there together in it.”

Friday, March 6
Coma Therapy, w/ Phantom Ships, Matt Megrue and 72nd & Central
Radio Room,
110 Poinsett Hwy., Greenville
8 p.m.
$7

Listening to Coma Therapy’s debut album, “No Lights Here,” it’s difficult to believe that the band actually started as a solo project by singer Dylan Eignor. The Clemson band’s debut album (expertly mixed by engineer Preston Dunnavant) is very much a group effort, layered with atmospheric guitars and pushed along by gentle-but-propulsive rhythms. “It started as just me messing around with acoustic stuff in my bedroom,” Eignor says. “And then eventually, I moved to Clemson, and that’s when I met [guitarist] Seth Proctor, and we decided to start writing music together, and that’s when I decided to make it a full-band project.” Eignor and Proctor both looked to 1980s post-punk music as their inspiration, and one can hear echoes of Joy Division and Bauhaus in their pitch-dark sound. “We wanted it to be very atmospheric,” Eignor says. “We don’t really want to sound like anybody else, but we like to write melancholy music as well. I think the most important part of this band is the different kinds of tones that we can get and experiment with on the guitars. We like to mess around with a lot of different effects, and it’s become a crucial part of the band.”

Friday, March 6
Machine Funk – A Tribute to Widespread Panic
Gottrocks,
200 Eisenhower Drive, Greenville
8 p.m.
$12

They’ve recorded plenty of albums, but the veteran Athens, Georgia jam-band Widespread Panic were made for the stage, much like their contemporaries Phish, and their cosmic forefathers, The Allman Brothers Band. And that’s how Machine Funk, a Widespread Panic tribute band from Florence, South Carolina, does things, up onstage playing songs that were made to be stretched, improvised upon and experimented with. Machine Funk has been at this for 14 years, channeling the far-reaching explorations of Widespread. But interestingly enough, they don’t just stick to that band’s repertoire; Machine Funk adds in material from groups like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Talking Heads, but they do so with Widespread-style curiosity, diving into those classic-rock warhorses from Zeppelin and Sabbath with the same zeal they use to explore David Byrne’s more idiosyncratic new-wave tunes. Think of them as a band that emulates Widespread Panic both literally and philosophically; you won’t find many musical boundaries here.

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