Elephant Micah

Durham’s Joseph O’Connell already had plenty of slightly weird folk albums as Elephant Micah under his belt before the truly weird creative breakthrough of Genericana last year. Whereas previous albums were easy to compare to Will Oldham, this hilariously titled outing requires rarer references, like Arthur Russell lost in an alien landscape of analog synthesis, dubby bass, and concrete-music recordings. The album is about both the natural world (which includes sound waves as well as trees and stones) and the mediums, like magnetic tape, used to capture it. While he removes the seam between the organic and the mechanical, O’Connell also replaces it with his warm, questing voice. For this Duke Coffeehouse headlining show, he’s bringing in Indiana psych-rock band Thee Open Sex—whose swirl of collaborators center on Magnetic South Recordings mastermind John Dawson—and enlisting the A/V Geeks to add live projections to the smart-trippy proceedings.