By the fall of 2007, Pattern Is Movement -- which started as a five-piece band -- finished shedding members, ending up as a duo.

Drummer Chris Ward recalled last week that the remaining members booked a tour before they'd even figured out exactly what the new incarnation would sound like. "That was the dumbest idea ever," he said of the tour.

They'd written a new album -- what ended up being 2008's All Together -- "not knowing that we could ever perform those songs," he said. "We hoped we could. We were banking on that. But we had no proof. We had never been a two-piece ever."

mp3 "Jenny Ono"

The dumb idea got dumber when the headliner of one concert canceled, and the venue offered Pattern Is Movement more money for a longer show; the band accepted. On the drive to the performance, Ward and keyboardist/singer Andrew Thiboldeaux picked four songs to cover to flesh out the set, and the drummer admits that it didn't go well. "The crowd didn't really like the show," he said.

But Pattern Is Movement's take on Radiohead's "Everything in Its Right Place" that night was an epiphany for both band and audience. "They loved that cover," Ward said. "They freaked out."

The original song is a keyboard and Thom Yorke's voice (both straight and heavily manipulated), and Ward said both were a good match for Thiboldeaux's falsetto and Rhodes - one of two keyboards he plays on stage, along with bass pedals.

"It anchored us; it just connected with the audience," Ward said. "I felt they were able to understand our songs a little more. ... That cover really opened up a direction for us as a band."

After three U.S. tours, the Philadelphia-based duo certainly has a better sense of itself, with the results on display at Huckleberry's on Saturday in a Daytrotter.com show. The covers these days are more cheeky --Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love" and D'Angelo's "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" -- and the band is undoubtedly sunnier than Yorke and company, but that Kid A-era Radiohead touchstone remains. With Rhodes, Mellotron, drums, and Thiboldeaux's airy voice, the sound is warm and burnished but complicated with the experimental textures of jazz and the subtle variations of minimalism.

While it's took the band six years from its 2001 founding to arrive at its current form, the destination isn't surprising. Ward and Thiboldeaux were a Christian-rap group in their early teens, formed a band in high school, and assembled Pattern Is Movement after college.

It was awkward to lose members regularly, Ward said: "Every time somebody saw us, we were a different band. 'Oh, there's four of you ... ? Oh, no, three, right? What? Hold on, there's two of you now?' ... You can't really get into a band when you don't have a clue what they're trying to do."

But that process helped the two recognize that they were the band by themselves. "As people started leaving, it just became apparent," he said.

mp3 "Right Away"

The duo wants to make complex, challenging music, Ward said, "but when you boil them down, he [Thiboldeaux] wants people to walk away and whistle them."

A great song, he added, "can always be pared down to a kick and a snare and an accordion, or a piano. That essentially is what we already are."

Pattern Is Movement will perform at Huckleberry's ( in Rock Island) on Saturday, June 6. The all-ages show also features The Netherfriends and starts at 7 p.m. Admission is $6.

For more information on Pattern Is Movement, visit MySpace.com/patternismovement. To hear the band's Daytrotter.com session, click here.

It would be easy to accuse Brent Havens of exploiting two things: the fondness people have for some seminal rock bands, and symphonies' need to diversity their audiences.

But his "The Music of" series - which matches a community symphony orchestra, a live traveling rock band, and classic songs - comes from a place of knowledge. Havens, who arranged the songs for orchestra and conducts, began with Led Zeppelin in 1996 and has expanded the repertoire to include Pink Floyd, The Doors, The Eagles, and Queen. The project has included more than 150 shows, two-thirds of which have been Led Zeppelin, Havens said.

When he presents the Music of Led Zeppelin for the Quad City Symphony Orchestra's Spring Pops concert on May 30, it will be readily apparent that he knows the band.

mp3

The phrase "hornets' nest" is usually employed as a metaphor, and it is in the lead track from Joe Price's new record, Rain Or Shine. But the origin of the song called "Hornet's Nest" is quite literal.

"I realized that it was time to start writing some words to some of these grooves," Price said in a phone interview this week, "so I went out to the shed and ... I started playing a little groove, and the next thing I know I had hornets all around me. And they were buzzing me. ... There were hornets' nests all over the damned shed. It was the slide, the sound of the slide, that made them curious. They never did sting me."

It could have been as simple as the slide guitar, but I'd like to think it might have been something more mystical that stirred up the hornets: the energy of creation after a songwriting and recording layoff of almost a decade.

Here are three things that Wallace Cochran told me in an interview last week to promote Drakkar Sauna's May 18 performance at RIBCO:

• The old-school country duo's upcoming album (set to be released on August 1) is titled 20009, which is pronounced "two thousand-ousand nine."
• "It's a theme record. It's about astronauts and love. Mostly astronauts and rocket travel and the failures of rocket travel in history."
• "Jeff [Stolz] definitely brought the Louvin Brothers to our relationship, and I'm glad I could respond to that with Mandy Patinkin."

A word of warning: None of this is necessarily true. Interviews with Drakkar Sauna typically play like dry comedy routines between Cochran and Stolz, as if they were lost members of Spinal Tap. For evidence, see the e-mail interview between the band and Daytrotter.com founder Sean Moeller, who has previously featured the band on his site and is bringing them back to town for the show and another recording session.

But while the band's interview style might be self-effacing and silly, and there's undoubtedly an oddball element to the music, it would be wrong to accuse Drakkar Sauna of not taking its craft seriously. On the band's albums, indie-sensibilities are fused with old-time country in an appealingly ramshackle concoction that sounds as if it came from a time-traveling saloon.