“We decorated it over the course of the year, and it sort of turned into this (expletive)-up, psychedelic, Joe’s Crab Shack thing,” said Taylor, now a sophomore. “... It was very campy in there, this psychedelic dungeon of mess. It was not the best academic environment, but it was a great environment to play music.”
In dorm room practice sessions, Wheel of the Year morphed from its initial incarnation — Taylor’s high school chamber-folk solo project, through which he released a pair of Christmas albums and an original two-song single — to its current state as an improvisation-prone, four-piece psych-folk band.
The group releases “Mouth Petals,” its first album under this configuration, September 11. The band recorded the song last spring with Edward Joyner of local folk outfit the Underhills in live, full-band sessions.
“The reason it sounds so raw — and there are even mistakes on it — is because we wanted it to be a pretty candid depiction of what Wheel of the Year is doing live and that collective spirit,” he said.
Part of that focus on catharsis, Taylor said, ties into a thematic through-line that concerns spirituality and, at times, the occult.
The name Wheel of the Year is derived from a pagan calendar. Taylor said he’s obsessed with Halloween, which accounts for some of the band’s flair for the dramatic.
“It’s almost all a joke at this point,” Hoffman said of the band.
But Taylor was also influenced by famed occultist Aleister Crowley and can be heard reading one of his poems during “Mouth Petals.” He was also influenced by Rob Young’s book “Electric Eden,” especially in its connection between British folk rock to noted Romantic poet and artist William Blake.
“I was so enamored by that thinking, and still am to a degree, that a lot of the music I made was kind of in the spirit of that,” he said.
Taylor also cited a concert by legendary noise rock band Swans, attended by himself, Hoffman and Wheel of the Year cellist Hannah Groves, as a starting point for Wheel of the Year’s musical mission.
“I couldn’t imagine that watching someone play the same riff for 45 minutes at the loudest volume humanly possible could put you in what I would call a mystical state, but that’s what it did to me,” he said.
When the band began playing shows last winter, Taylor said he was worried about how they might be received by audiences.
Because Bloomington’s indie rock scene is largely structured around house shows and parties, he said he was especially concerned people might talk over their quiet sets.
Instead, he said, the opposite has proven true, with rooms falling silent without fail.
“People often sit down on their own accord to watch us play and really jive with what we’re doing, and I’m incredibly grateful for that,” he said.
Those performances, he said, are heavily cyclic and drone-influenced in addition to their improvisational leanings.
While the live shows will continue in that vein, what comes after “Mouth Petals” will be more ambitiously produced and tightly structured. Taylor has already written most of a “Mouth Petals” follow-up.JE
One of his favorite bands, he said, is the Grateful Dead, which had a penchant for recording tight, pop-accessible songs and spinning them into sprawling 20-minute jams onstage.
Though Wheel of the Year’s music might not quite qualify as “pop,” Taylor said he and the rest of the band want to push audiences’ boundaries and share their catharsis with them.
“This is an artistic thing, a thing for fun,” he said. “It makes us feel good, and hopefully makes others feel good when they listen to it and participate in it and engage with it.”
