LIVE MUSIC: EMPEROR X / ROYAL ARCTIC INSTITUTE / THE ADVENTURE SOUNDTRACK PROTOTYPE 237, Paterson

He has a track in the Veronica Mars movie, features in three NPR stories, and composes video soundtrack music for Planned Parenthood and SEIU. Listeners of the 99% Invisible podcast might be familiar with him as the guy commissioned to write a song that would last 10,000 years for discouraging settlement near nuclear waste repositories, created in the form of a folk song about genetically engineered cats. Now indie-folk musician Chad Matheny, who has been releasing music as Emperor X since 1998, will join us from Berlin on his surprise U.S. (and Sweden) tour to premiere the NJ-focused track off his brand new EP of emotionally charged songs about transportation infrastructure of the Northeast Corridor. Described as “a spastic, legally blind, nomadic songwriter whose performances transform venues/living rooms/arts spaces into punk rock micro-raves” (Alternative Press), Emperor X should find himself quite at home on the Prototype stage.

“One of the hidden jewels of the urban Northeast” (The Big Takeover), instrumental post-punk cinematic jazz ensemble The Royal Arctic Institute returns to P237 from the polar ice cap following its second release in two years recorded and produced by Yo La Tengo’s James McNew. Decades after making “indelible marks on the east coast’s underground rock heyday of the 80s and 90s” (Chicago Reader), TRAI’s recently released mini-album of chill post-rock instrumentals, From Coma to Catharsis, follows up on their 2022 EP From Catnip to Coma. An attempt to capture the auditory experience of waking from a coma, the new album “favors a mysterious, semi-ambient wash of cosmic Americana, as if filtering the Southwestern vistas of their imagination through the lens of a telescope tuned to the stars,” writes Austin-based journalist Michael Toland. We can’t wait to be entranced again.

Time traveling gondolier and The Adventure Soundtrack bassist Maurice Selkirk has set the coordinates for a return visit to Prototype with the band’s quirky original songs and psychedelic improvisational textures. Influenced by bands such as Pink Floyd, Talking Heads and Tom Petty, the four-piece band plays from a 20-year catalog of unique songwriting captured over four studio albums. They called Prototype their new favorite place after their first show and we are prepared here for another out-of-body experience.

It’s gonna get spacey – and we don’t mean Kevin,

Come join us for this concert at the “Closest thing to Heaven”