Ian Paige's liquid project, White Light has taken many forms under various names over the years. Their performance at HillyTown presents on a humid August evening marked both an end and a beginning.

The band forms a circle in the corner, turned in, tuned in, to each other as a bright red light bounces off the wall in the back.

Their intimacy doesn't exclude the crowd around them, however. It almost feels like White Light's circle is built on the audience, like our being there is an essential part of this music. Floating like a yolk, White Light's performance seemed to feed off the atmosphere in the room as much as it helped to supply it.

Some might call that a 'feedback loop.'

White Light is primarily a solo project for Ian Paige. A liquid, flowing movement, the band has taken many different members under several different names over the past several years. Paige lets the project take it where it leads him, and with Caitlin King has formed a new project, Planets Around The Sun. Paige says Planets Around The Sun is the same thing as White Light, just with a new name and heading in a different direction. It seems his musical direction blossoms from inside each current project, neither destroying nor erasing it, like fractals sprouting off crystal.

This constant flux, ebbing and flowing and abiding in music, starts way back at the beginning of Paige's musical career. The Squire Strat you hear twisted through pedals and amps was purchased on a whim. He had been at a music store with his high school friend (Casey Keenan of Carlisle Sound, Pants Yell! and Major Stars) who was looking for drums. Paige fell in love with the guitar and Keenan's dad fronted him the money for it right there in the store.

Ian says he paid Keenan's Dad back quickly.

But the love affair started there and doesn't look like it'll be ending any time soon. In music, Paige has found an interesting duality that suits his person:

"It makes me exceedingly happy and fulfilled. I like rock music culture because it can operate on both the heady level of production and a very isolated personal craft of painting with sound for a recording and on the visceral communal level of playing with and for people. I need both."

The duality is reflected on the night we see White Light. The night here in this video. In front of an acoustic band, banjo, cello and drums, Paige plays an electric guitar. In front of an audience, White Light makes their music. Separate but integral pieces coming together to perform something more powerful than the sum of its parts.

Paige also talks about how he's been making the same song over the course of his music making career. Looking over notebooks, he says the same theme runs through the entire way. That's one element. But the expression of that theme has been changing, morphing, turning itself over through the years. That's another element. The duality again. Both parts coming together.

Even the name "White Light" suggests a sort of split, as there is no light without a lack thereof. Or as Townes Van Zandt says, "There ain't no dark 'til something shines."

And that split, that divide shows up again outside of what the audience sees. Ian says he's practicing old folk songs on an acoustic guitar in his living room even while making the "loudest, weirdest sounds [he] can find in [their] practice space."

He says everything's pliable.

Speaking of pliable, I have it on good word that that banjo might well be replaced by an electric guitar.

But that electric hypnosis in a White Light set, that floating energy that's separate from but part of the audience, that divide between electric and acoustic, that changing sound, that constant theme. That's still White Light, even if the name changes.

The ebb and flow, the flux and wane, the change.

It's permanent.