Justin Wright’s Expo Seventy envelops you in strangeness

“I feel like my music is an acquired taste,” Justin Wright tells me over beers at Dave’s Stagecoach. “It won’t relate to everybody, but if people are really into music, they’ll understand where I’m coming from.”

It’s early on a weeknight, and our conversation is audible to the handful of patrons at the bar. One or two occasionally cast sidelong glances our way. Wright, 39, seems unperturbed by this. He sits stoically, looking more like a long-distance trucker than an artist, with his reddish beard and his vintage puffy vest over a western shirt. Tattooed forearms lead to freckled hands that form gestures as he speaks.

Wright is the frontman — often the only man — of Expo ’70, which he calls an “art project” that involves experimental, psychedelic music. In conversation, as in performance, he’s intense. His speech is tentative and soft, and he answers questions in long, careful detail without ever straying from the topic.

He has been working as Expo ’70 since 2003, when he still lived in California. He relocated to his native Kansas City two years later, but much of the sound encompassed by his project is taken from what he discovered in his seven years on the West Coast: midcentury classical music, krautrock, minimalism, Brian Eno, Ash Ra Tempel. This is what Wright means when he says his music isn’t for everyone: It isn’t the kind of thing you pop in your car stereo on a road trip with other people.

“When I was in the band Living Science Foundation [in California from 2000 to 2003], I started acquiring a lot of effects pedals, and I got really interested in experimenting with using them and playing guitar,” Wright says. “I started going into the studio on my own and looping things and playing with textures. I had gotten into minimal drone music, and that was kind of my inspiration. When I moved to Kansas City, I started getting into alternate tuning, and that’s really the basis of the sound that I have, from how my guitar is tuned and then going into the effects.”

By the end of this month, Wright hopes to have in his hands remastered vinyl editions of Expo ’70’s first recording, July 18, 2004. (The title is simply that album’s original release date.) The package — which will also be available on CD and cassette — ideally was going to be ready on the 10th anniversary, this past summer, but there were, he says, holdups at the pressing plant. In any format, it’s a big listen; five of the six songs stretch well past the 10-minute mark (the final track is more than 23 minutes), and each moves past mere strangeness or psychedelic acid trip toward something closer to an attempt at communicating with an alien life form. The album could be a post-apocalyptic SOS.

But the Expo ’70 live experience, Wright says, is entirely separate from how it sounds on record. The recordings — around 30 albums’ worth, by Wright’s estimation — are never translated fully when Expo ’70 performs, whether he’s playing solo or performing with occasional bandmates bassist Aaron Osborne and drummer Chris Fugit. (That trio goes by Expo Seventy.) The songs take on their own characteristics, determined by the venue and the energy of the night. It’s not improvisation, but no audience gets the same show twice.

“Because I use so many effects, it is really hard to go into a live situation and re-create everything that I’m doing,” Wright says. “I don’t use samplers or computers or anything. I think it’s better to be organic when I’m playing live, to listen to the room, and the way that I’m playing is affected in it. When I’m at the studio, it’s a really different environment — being isolated with no one else around versus playing for an audience.”

It’s also for that reason, Wright says, that he often faces away from his audience when he’s performing solo. In April, when Expo ’70 opened for legendary U.K. psych-rock act Loop, Wright was almost completely obscured by a fog machine that engulfed the venue in continuous billows. It made for an oddly paralyzing experience, knowing that any sudden movements might result in a collision or a face plant. We were rooted for a half-hour, focusing on Wright’s ever-diminishing silhouette and surrounded by enigmatic, amorphous sounds that came closer with each new wave of smoke.

When I bring up the Loop show, Wright laughs lightly, flashing a rare, shy smile. He hit the wrong button on the fog machine, he tells me. The whole thing was an accident — one he was fine with.

“It’s really not about me performing. It’s about listening to the music and how it evolves and spans my set,” he says. “I think it worked out OK.”