This has been a psychedelic week for me, still feeling the afterglow of seeing Pigs x7, so before I could enter this new trip closer to home, I needed to sober up off the lingering sonic buzz. I wanted to clear out the leftover distortion rattling in my head so I could step into the Ventura Music Hall with ears and mind ready to feel the pure, authentic high off the sound of Glass Beams.
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Glass Beams plays in the tradition of distorting and disrupting traditional, exotic world music into modernized, minimalist psychedelia. Their music doesn’t need to shout, roar, or crash like a doom riff to get you there; it works in repetition, mood, and layering. It works in space. They aren’t the first to attempt this blend and they won’t be the last, but at the moment, they feel like the only band making traditional world music vibrations consumable for folks interested in dancing on clouds, instead of just headbanging in basements.
Shows like this are rare in Ventura, though they strike a nerve in both artist and audience that no other city quite can. Ventura has always been a kind of liminal space between the sleepy, salt-rusted coast and the intensity of Los Angeles just down the highway. Playing at the Majestic Ventura Music Hall is often a chance for bands to kick off tours and shake off rust before heading to the bigger markets, but for the audience, there’s an intimacy and novelty. The city’s deep affinity for reggae, surf rock, and stoner jams makes psychedelic music like this the perfect middle ground to attract a wider net of people. It’s strange, maybe even ironic, that Ventura’s culture primes its audience better for a show like this than the larger cities nearby.
That became clear when Glass Beams sold out the Monday night show like it was a Saturday headliner, as if no one had work or school to deal with the next morning. Smoke filled the air the way it always does in this town, but instead of sitting heavy, it seemed to swirl and dissipate with the energy of the crowd. Dancing broke up the smoke and the seaside city was serenaded with trippy trio instrumentals and vibrant, elemental electronics. For a Monday night, it was almost suspicious how ready everyone seemed to surrender themselves to the music.
The first time I saw Glass Beams, I was immediately into the gimmick. Masked players resembling Soul Calibur’s Voldo, a character with no care for eye slits to see through, moving with anonymous fluidity. Their masks are meant to inspire symbolism through abstract geometry rather than to hide. They remove the personal ego of the players and leave only a visual frame for the sound. The trio is the brainchild of Australian-Indian multi-instrumentalist Rajan Silva, who stood center stage at Ventura Music Hall between two golden pillar speakers. Each pillar balanced a synth on top, and Rajan alternated between them and his guitar like some kind of masked conjurer commanding frequencies from either side.
His masked face, slender frame, and braided hair made him appear androgynous, which only added to the mystery. What came across was not the image of a frontman, but of a medium. Rajan was less a person on stage and more a channel for this strange energy, a musical force of nature. The trio as a whole came across like a set of danavas—demonic figures from Hindu myth—summoned not to destroy but to inspire audiences to dance and trip until they completely forgot about eating, drinking, and breathing.
Despite that description, the tone of their live sound was surprisingly jovial. It wasn’t heavy, dark, or threatening, but instead uplifting, groove-driven, and playful. They inspired Ventura to vibe harder than I had ever seen at any show in that venue. A band I had compared them to beforehand, Khruangbin, works in a similar hypnotic groove-driven way. Both bands cast the kind of spell that makes people stop analyzing, stop intellectualizing, and just move. For most of the audience, that spell takes root instantly. But I’m usually one of the rare exceptions. Normally, when faced with minimalist instrumental grooves, I find myself longing for vocals, for some kind of lyrical anchor.
Glass Beams broke that nerve in me. They pushed me past the point of overthinking how I should enjoy minimalist sounds. I stopped waiting for words. I was all in on the vibe and the way they blended in trippy ambient electronics with the repetitive grooves to create an experimental atmosphere designed to feed professional trippers exactly what they came for.
And yet, what struck me most was how accessible it was. I’ve been to plenty of experimental shows where audiences that are diehard for Lightning in a Bottle desert ayahuasca temple dancing or white-rasta-pasta reggae often reject the more atonal fringes of the ambient and noise scenes. The cool thing about Glass Beams, which very few artists have succeeded at, is properly bridging those worlds. They unite the Desert Daze psychedelic rock crowd with the Lightning in a Bottle DMT EDM crowd. It’s almost baffling it hasn’t been done this seamlessly before—both camps thrive in dusty festival spaces, both love to stretch time and melt into grooves, both seek transcendence in repetition. Yet only now, with Glass Beams, does it feel natural.
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Walking up to the venue that night, I could already feel that sense of anticipation. The line spilled out front, with people jostling each other to get in. There was electricity in the air, a kind of collective knowing that this was about to be a community-defining night of music. That’s the nature of a rare event in a city like Ventura: when the stars align, the memory of it doesn’t fade into the noise of countless other concerts the way it might in Los Angeles. It imprints, it sticks, it becomes folklore. People will be talking about this night for a while.
The night opened with Los Eclipses, a French-Mexican duo whose sound blended European and Latin influences into chill, jazzy, psych-lounge vibes. They set the tone without overwhelming it, a prelude that let the audience sway and sink into the buzz. Their set felt like an inhale before the real trip began, a twilight warmup before the plunge into midnight.
Glass Beams, by contrast, injected the full high. Their latest release exemplifies the thematic core of their sound. Mahal (2024) is a record that mirrors the minimalist, cyclical vibes of their live set. Even the title—“palace” in Hindi—suggests a space of both grandeur and minimalism, a structure built of repeating arches, patterns, and symmetry. They had toured the album at larger venues, including the Wiltern in Los Angeles, which I regretfully missed. Catching them here, in a smaller room, felt like a redemption arc. It was a chance to experience them in an intimate setting where the crowd’s energy wasn’t diluted but amplified.
Even their stage setup reflected the minimalist philosophy. Instead of a cluttered wall of Marshall stacks or extravagant gear, they kept it sparse: one amp behind the guitarist, the two golden pillars flanking Rajan, and the drummer’s kit outfitted with a spiral cymbal that gleamed under the lights. That cymbal, shaped like a descending coil, symbolized exactly what their music does: spirals outward and downward, exotic yet intentional, mesmerizing yet controlled.
The sound itself blended Hindustani and Carnatic ragas with 70s Bollywood funk, layered over cosmic jazz, psych, and electronic drone textures. It’s a sonic mandala—repetitive, symmetrical, pulling you into its center. Each cycle of notes, each hypnotic riff, draws the unconscious mind deeper until even a single bent note can unravel the trance and rewire your focus. It’s both organic and calculated, both loose and methodical.
And the crowd, myself included, was powerless against it. We weren’t perceiving ourselves being led, but we were all being puppeteered by the rhythm. I lost track of time. I forgot I had to wake up early for work. The thought never crossed my mind. I was inside the music, moving with it, forgetting to analyze it, forgetting to hold myself apart from it.
That’s the rare magic of Glass Beams. They do something few bands can manage: package pure bliss and escape inside a container you can carry anywhere. They distill the essence of transcendence into a sound you can access at will. Like a desert mirage captured in a bottle, they offer both the drink and the buzz. Their sound bridges festival subcultures, unites disparate audiences, and transcends geography. They aren’t just another psychedelic band; they’re an evolutionary step, blending Indian classical spirituality with Western psych grooves and festival culture in a way that feels inevitable.
As the show ended and the smoke thinned, I left the Ventura Music Hall in a daze, still wrapped in the glow of it all. It wasn’t just another gig. It was a proof of concept that Ventura, often overlooked, could host a night of transcendence. That a Monday night could feel like a desert festival. That a band from Melbourne could tap into something ancient and global and channel it right here in a coastal town.
Glass Beams reminded me that music is still capable of sneaking up and knocking you out of your routines. They reminded me that sometimes the gimmick isn’t just a gimmick—it’s a mask for something deeper. They reminded me that I don’t need vocals to be carried away.
They bottled the desert and uncorked it in Ventura. And we all drank deep.
Words by Rob Shepyer
Photos by Michelle Evans
