Night Gallery exudes a gorgeous tragedy and lush noir within the countless facets and folds of its music. It is a sound that skirts both the sacred and secular, the cinematic and sensational. You'll find yourself washed in it and moved by it. You'll want to drown in it.

Too edgy to be labeled art rock, too progressive to call it neo-classical (don't you just hate that label anyway?) and flat-out too cool for church, Night Gallery's definitions, explanations, and excuses tend to lie outside the musical lexicon. Night Gallery relies heavily on the audience members' individual trips, though the band offers a multimedia splendor of projections and interpretive dance as a kind of guide. It's all up for interpretation. The band's magnificence, however, is not.

Formed in 2005 as a long-distance studio project between Eric Zabriskie and Evan Wormwood while Zabriskie was in Chicago and Wormwood was at RIT, the duo created complex, densely layered music on an eight-track. When the time came to flesh it out and perform about a year and a half ago, they were faced with the task of interpreting its flowing infinity with mortal hands. The band formed out of that process of recreation, and now also includes Dennis Gaebel (guitars) and Patrick Hastings (bass), and occasional appearances by violinist Anyango Yarbo-Davenport, Matt Klock on synthesizer, and Willy O'Riley on piano. Original architects Wormwood and Zabriskie sat down with us recently to shed some light on the project. An edited transcript follows.

CITY: How did you arrive at this sound?

Eric Zabriskie: The sound developed in those old eight-track recordings. Then we'd come together in the summers. It was just us two. The sound was forged in those times, because we were unrestricted by an obligation to a live set up, so we would just layer to our heart's content - make it as big and as full as we wanted. Any idea we had would go down. And now with violin, piano, analog synth, we're sort of catching up to the original intent for the size of the sound.

Did you have a name at that point?

Zabriskie: Not really, because we were doing it for ourselves.

What adjustments were needed to become a live band?

Zabriskie: I think we were brave enough to be slow, dark, not always groovy and in your face. I was getting more into classical composition, and [Evan] was venturing more into African percussion.

It takes guts to play slow.

Zabriskie: I think we are just now, in the last three months of performing, living up to the pace of the album. It's hard.

Evan Wormwood: It never effects us when we're writing. But when you're in that moment on stage and you see people and they want to move and we're playing a waltz...

Zabriskie: We had to adapt to live; we didn't have to adapt to recording.

Wormwood: When there was only two of us, we never even thought about playing out live.

What are some of the advantages of playing live?

Zabriskie: Things that just happen are exciting, and the feedback from the crowd that's so instantaneous. We made music for ourselves for a long time.

Nothing wrong with that.

Zabriskie: Making music for yourself is great for self expression, but the reception of a live audience is crucial for communication. Until you have that, art is only in halves. We were expressing ourselves, but we weren't engaging the cycle of communication. Often live, feedback comes through people dancing and things like that, so if we had started live I think there would‘ve have been more of a drive to have that beat there that gets people moving. But now I think we're looking for more internal motion, like sort of an emotional response.

What are some elements you've adopted to be a live band? What's the show?

Wormwood: The dancers and projection, since we're not doing those things like throwing our guitars around.

How do the dancers fit in?

Wormwood: If we play a waltz, then they waltz. We give them guidance based on what the song's about, but in many ways they're on their own.

Zabriskie: People don't always go out to a club to sit down and think, or sit down and just be washed over by ambient sounds, and they might want to have some energy. So I think the video projection and the dancers help to bring them into the space we want to get them into. And that just further convinces the audience to engage in the space we want to take them to.

The religious music you heard in temple wound up here in your secular band. How?

Zabriskie: I was raised a Jew in Watertown. It was a small congregation. There were like two Jews my age growing up. Not too many of the religious traditions influenced me, but as a little kid, the whole congregation would be chanting these really sad harmonic minor melodies - similar to Gregorian chant - very floaty and vowel-esque. That music just got in my blood. It's absolutely tragic and gorgeous.

And the fact that it was in Yiddish made the voice more instrumental.

Zabriskie: Absolutely. I didn't understand a word I was singing, but I understood completely the feeling. And to me that was the truth of Judaism, that tone of tragedy.

As a band, how big are you willing to go in order to match the multitude of layers found in your recorded music?

Zabriskie: I think we need to work with what we have for a little while. I would never want it to feel accessoried, just for the sake of having this big thing. I want every aspect to have a very important role to play.

When pressed by fans to explain what genre you're in, what do you say?

Zabriskie: We don't say much. I feel if people like us it's because they are willing to fall into the mood.

Is being essentially the only band in your genre hard or easy?

Zabriskie & Wormwood: Both.

Zabriskie: What people may not understand about us is a lot of our songs are genre songs. A lot of these songs start as the waltz song, the trip-hop song, the Latin song, the dub-reggae song. But by the end we've sort of bent the conventions of these genres to our sound and explored them to get something darker and everyone tells us, "I really like your sound."

What would you like listeners to walk away with from a Night Gallery show?

Zabriskie: I would hope for an introspective adventure for our listener, exploring parts of themselves that aren't always uncovered every day.

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