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Past canvas and easel, Jakob Battick and Friends wax harmonic over Gorham.

Nick and I drive out an October Sunday, passing bright yellow leaves and apple stands. We drive onto USM's Gorham campus and thread through the old farm buildings past students preparing for parents' homecoming visit.

Jakob and his cousin Milo, both skeletal, smiling, with acersecomic halos, meet us and escort us through the art building to the set that Jakob built for the filming.

They're infectiously enthusiastic. Hauling equipment and chattering as they set up. They introduce us to the band and go about staging members. Mark on the drums clearly goes in the back. Amplified bass and violin off to one side, Jakob's amp to the other. Milo, Jakob's cousin, and his accordion next to the amp.

The set: Jakob has built a stage for our video. Decorative fabrics hang on the wall under a string of Christmas lights. A cardboard moon hangs over the drum kit. One of Jakob's recent assignments rests drying against the wall. There's a Goya tilted against the drum kit.

And even if he hadn't built the set, the band would've had a nice backdrop. The building they took [dog] and [pony] to is the painters' studio. The room is filled with easels,canvases , paintings, drawings, sketches. There are flowers, leaves, wrinkled tubes of various colors of paint, brushes, mirrors. The art ranges from representational to abstract. There are still lifes, great swirls of splattered color, a surrealist montage centered around a pink elephant, a series of aquatic discs, a mounted deer with a rosy nose. A disturbing clown.

They're playing on the second floor, which has windows on all sides and is filled with soft white light as the sun passes over the high point for the day.

Jakob is a John Lennon scarecrow. Tall, skinny. Wavy hair, small glasses. Jacob's guitar is painted entirely white, not just the body, but the neck and the headstock. On the body of the guitar in a scratchy script is written "Córdoba / Far Away and Alone!" from the Federico Garcia Lorca poem "Song of the Rider." He kicks and jerks around while playing, hunching over his guitar. When seated for All That Really Lasts he can't contain himself. He stamps his feet, he rises out of his seat and falls back into it.

Jakob Battick carries with him a creative air. As if his halo of hair contains some sort of right brained steroids, like he's some sort of artistic Sampson. He's committed to his creativity. Battick says that he has always been interested in creating. Creating art, creating music. He has been teaching himself to live as cheaply as possible so he can work as little as possible to meet his bills and focus the rest of his time on creating. Battick has been considering pursuing a Masters Degree in Art with the ultimate goal of teaching. That way, he reasons, he'd be working in a field he loves and have off time to create.

Jakob Battick and Friends make a distinct style of music. A hypnotic drive swells, builds and explodes through the music. The dynamic range varies from exceedingly quiet - just Jakob and his guitar - to a boots-rattling furor - with all the band raging and forcing their melodies and harmonies out of their instruments, squeezing them like a tube of toothpaste. Their energy, direction and drive is singular, they gel and unite, their disparate instruments come together and push the song up and out, expanding and flowing and cooling hard, only for the song to build and swell again. Watching All That Really Lasts, the swells come in waves and build on each other, creating a solid foundation and building the next swell higher than before.

It's pretty intense.

One of the defining characteristics, what really sticks out to me, anyway, is the violin. Their violinist, Roy, is classically trained. He has been playing since the age of six.

Roy joined the band almost by accident - a happy accident, though. He just happened to walk by their practice space and asked if he could join in with his violin. Roy watches the band while not supplying a drone, and when it is time to shine he closes his eyes and rises above the miasma. His classical training and years of experience have given him the skill to fit to the music, and fit he does. For someone who joined the band as something of an afterthought, Roy provides an integral piece of the band's sound.

Jakob Battick and Friends create art.