Tim Barnes’s Inside Energy

Earlier this year, I interviewed Ken Brown/Bundy K. Brown, musician, producer, engineer, and original member of Tortoise and Gastr del Sol, about his musical project Jungle Boogie. During our conversation, Ken shared that one of the early configurations of Jungle Boogie was Ken and drummer Britt Walford playing with their friend Tim Barnes. Brown related in the interview that although the trio dissolved, the duo kept going and some of the music by the three-piece would be released later in 2025. 

At the moment, I didn’t know who Barnes was and kept going with the interview. Afterwards, I looked into Barnes’s background and learned about his significant contribution to indie and experimental music over the last 30 years. To wit, he played on three of my favorite albums, providing percussion to Wilco’s A Ghost is Born, Jim O’Rourke’s Insignificance and Silver Jews’ American Water. 

He’s the type of musician that other musicians want to play on their albums to provide a certain type of sound or bring a singular vibe to the recording process. Other players who fit that description include keyboardist Augie Meyers, the drum and bass duo of Sly & Robbie, or drummer Jim White. These are musicians that music nerds like me can’t resist writing about. The phrase “musician’s musician” doesn’t quite cover it. Barnes and others of his ilk are musical adventurers and instigators, curious about new sounds and collaborations, and always ready to provide the exact sort of energy needed for a specific project.

In 2021, Barnes and his family announced that he had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. Soon, Brown initiated a recording project in which Barnes’s many friends in the experimental music community could play with him once again. Noumena and Lost Words, two records documenting these collaborations, were released on Barnes’s Quakebasket label in association with Drag City. The release of these albums resulted in warm and thoughtful media coverage, including Marc Masters’s exceptional Bandcamp Daily story about his history with Barnes and Brown’s coordination of the project as well as Vish Khanna’s delightful conversation between Brown, O’Rourke, and Glenn Kotche about Barnes and his wide-ranging musical passions. I also wrote about Noumena and Lost Words for Aquarium Drunkard. 

A few weeks ago, Island House Recordings issued Inside Energy, another batch of recordings from the series of collaborations with Barnes. It is as exciting, diverse, and dynamic as the previous releases, but has not received the same level of media attention. The all-instrumental recordings on Inside Energy differ from Noumena and Lost Words in that generally they are longer, jammier, even trippier. Below are thoughts about each cut on Inside Energy. Barnes’s collaborators are listed, though the credits don’t include what instruments they play.

“Metamorphosis Alpha” – Tim Barnes with Ken Brown, Bob Dixon & D. Alex Meeks

I previously wrote an essay about how certain Western songs contain the feeling of a songline. Songlines are a celebration of the ancestors by Aboriginal Australians, which also contain the directional code necessary to traverse through the land. I’ve always felt that different versions of the titanic Grateful Dead jam vehicle “Dark Star” is a songline that moves away from the Earth’s surface rather than over it. “Metamorphosis Alpha” contains the same songline-in-space qualities of a “Dark Star” interspace voyage jam. The sound gathers and builds as the group swerves and undulates as if adjusting to the wrenches and fluctuations endured while traveling through a wormhole. The guitar flares heard throughout “Metamorphosis Alpha” could be tears in the time fabric as the intensity of the percussion increases. Eventually, the band moves into an established, driving groove that could even be danceable. This eventuality is impressive considering the journey it took to get there. This 25-minute plus jam is a remarkable way to open an album. 

“Right To Roam” – Tim Barnes with Ken Brown, Bob Dixon & D. Alex Meeks

The same collection of musicians from the opening track come back together for another extended performance, this time beginning with percussion sounds placed up front in the mix. This has to be Barnes, playing an unsettling part that kickstarts the evil sound of “Right To Roam” into gear. To keep the Grateful Dead comparisons going, if “Metamorphosis Alpha” is akin to “Dark Star” then this song is more in the “The Other One” mode. We need more from this set of musicians as they produced, back-to-back, two of the best studio-based jams released in 2025.

“Inside Energy” – Tim Barnes with Ken Brown, Glenn Kotche, Douglas Andrew McCombs & Britt Walford

The title cut is the shortest on the album, yet it’s instantaneously memorable as the loud, throbbing bass seems to press the listener’s face into the mud. This thick, gooey groove with malevolent implications is a fitting soundtrack to our day-to-day confrontations with the darkest aspects of humanity.

“I Know You Walk In The Wilderness” – Tim Barnes with Ken Brown, Chris Forsyth, Ryan Jewell & Douglas Andrew McCombs

According to Masters, this recording is the result of Forsyth’s band coming to Barnes and Brown’s hometown of Louisville to jam in between gigs. The result is a reunion of Brown and McCombs, who have a long recording history going back to Tortoise and Pullman days. In fact, this two-bass, two-percussionist lineup recalls the early days of Tortoise, when it was bassists and drummers all the way down. “I Know You Walk In The Wilderness”  is anchored by Forsyth, who declines the role of guitar hero and instead opts for connective tissue playing. This accentuates and highlights the entrancing double bass combo of Brown and McCombs, who interact and play off of one another. 

“Gamma World” – Tim Barnes with Ken Brown, Curtis Harvey, Tara Jane O’Neil & Britt Walford

This recording recalls the magnetic scene from Steven Spielberg’s 2022 film The Fabelmans, in which the young, wannabe film director meets the great John Ford. Ford — played so memorably by David Lynch — insists: “When the horizon is at the bottom, it’s interesting. When the horizon is at the top, it’s interesting. When the horizon is in the middle, it’s boring as shit. Now good luck to you and get the fuck out of my office!”

“Gamma World” somehow contains horizon lines simultaneously at both the top and the bottom of the track, so it’s certainly interesting! Harvey and O’Neil inject liquid guitar and deep ambient tones behind the multiple horizon line grooves conjured up by the Jungle Boogie rhythm section of Brown and Walford. 

“Backwards Before Dawn” – Tim Barnes with Ken Brown, Tara Jane O’Neil & Britt Walford

Also soaked with cinematic qualities, this recording seems to capture the feeling of the last rays of darkness before dawn, to riff off the song’s title. The combination of the crackling bass, quicksilver drumming and percussion, and resounding guitar is infused with an ominous, flatline dread that stretches on and on before reaching a gradual yet beautiful fade out to end the album.

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Inside Energy is bursting with a diverse collection of musical tones and ideas. Thanks to Brown’s mixing and production mastery, the album’s sound is immaculate throughout, always inviting even during the darkness depicted in the music. Most of all, the variety of players who were eager to come together and collaborate with Barnes once again on Inside Energy as well as Noumena and Lost Words is a positive reflection and an enduring demonstration on the vast connections and influence that Barnes has within his experimental music community.