There Goes the Sun: The slow re-emergence of KC’s sludge-rock sleeper Expo Seventy

Expo Seventy. // photo courtesy the artist

On April 5, approximately 60 hours before Hot Springs, Arkansas, enters the path of the Great North American Solar Eclipse, Kansas City band Expo Seventy will take the stage.

This is all part of Atlas Obscura’s Ecliptic Festival which includes Deerhoof, Angel Olsen, Hailu Mergia, the Sun Ra Arkestra and Blonde Redhead, among many others. For Justin Wright’s 20 year old music project, this marks on the second concert the current lineup of musicians have played in the past three years.

While KC gets a preview closer to home, April 3, at The Ship. this festival gig will mark a huge step forward for a group whose re-emergence has been long delayed.

Expo Seventy has had a remarkable ability to remain mostly below the radar, while still cultivating an avid fan base and snagging high-profile gigs. The Ecliptic Festival is only the latest example.

At the beginning of 2018, the band had been asked to perform at Valley of the Vapors—an annual Hot Springs concert event known for its eclectic programming. Wright, who has released dozens of albums on several labels and on his own label, got the invite due to a connection with Sonny Kay—executive director of Low Key Arts, the organization that helps put on the festival. Wright knew Kay from his days in Los Angeles, where Kay—once the vocalist for punk band the VSS—ran the Gold Standard Laboratories label.

Unfortunately, bad luck intervened. Wright, a former graphic designer who now does remodeling work, had a run-in with a table saw in February of that year, nearly losing a couple of fingers on his left hand. Six years, a couple tendon surgeries, some intensive physical therapy and one GoFundMe campaign later, Wright’s hand has mostly healed (the tip of his pinkie and one thumbnail are missing and he can’t make a full fist), his guitar technique has been adjusted, he’s got a new version of the band together.

Expo Seventy has taken many forms since Wright began the project in Los Angeles in 2003.

After he moved back to his hometown of Kansas City, Wright continued it as a solo endeavor and with a loose confederation of local musicians. His music sticks to a pretty consistent template: Instrumental, improvisatory and long-form, with an emphasis on atmosphere and textures, but it finds a wealth of diverse sounds within those boundaries, from immersive drones a la early Earth or Klaus Schulze to reverb-heavy guitar rambles in the vein of Ash Ra Tempel, to meditative electronic symphonies reminiscent of Fripp & Eno.

In the mid-aughts, he started using a larger band format, with a rotating cast of musicians including bassist Aaron Osborne (who now plays with improv stalwarts EMAS), drummer Mike Vera, and ambient musician David Williams. In the band format, his music has slowly grown more riff-based and sludgy, sounding something like The Melvins at their most abstruse and amorphous, yet still retaining a semblance of cosmic flow. The latest configuration of the group—Chris Fugitt on drums, guitarist Aaron Hawn, and bassist Rod Peal—has pushed Wright even further in this direction, due in no small part to the members’ musical pasts. Peal is a member of psyched-out hard rockers The Philistines, while Hawn was in the turbulent, Doors-indebted Mythical Beast, and Fugitt has played with esoteric metal bands Totimoshi and Federation of Horsepower.

Wright’s hand injury also affected his sound, causing him to rethink the way he structures his bristling compositions.

“I’m a little scaled-back at what I’m doing,” Wright says. “It took a bit of work to be able to get up and actually, like be able to perform, like standing up,” he says. Besides the basic physical logistics, it’s changed his style as well.

“Usually when we would play gigs, we would have songs kind of outlined, and we’d always improvise in them, and now things are a little more streamlined as set songs, with still the element of improv going on, but not as much. It’s more like, I guess, ’70s rock,” Wright says. Wright splits his signal between two amps, with two delay pedals at each end, giving his dense dissonance a widescreen, kaleidoscopic effect. “It makes it seem like there’s a lot more people playing at once,” he says. If it’s ’70s rock, it’s decidedly of the Hawkwind Space Ritual variety.

The Arkansas festival won’t be all hot riffs and cool grooves. For the beginning of their set, Expo Seventy will be playing in front of a film, George Melies’ classic 1902 silent short A Trip to the Moon, performing a live score.

This local show at The Ship will serve as a warmup for the festival and as a debut for the latest configuration of Expo Seventy. These two shows won’t mark the end of the group’s near-future adventures. Wright hopes to soon take the band into the studio at Weights and Measures Soundlab, operated by Season to Risk guitarist Duane Trower.

“We’re ready to record maybe in the middle of this year,” he says, and hopes to have a label lined up for whatever record emerges.

Expo Seventy plays Wednesday, April 3, at The Ship, Tickets available here. They also play on Friday, April 5, at Atlas Obscura’s Ecliptic Festival. Tickets available here.