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Crete Mixes With Indie Rock To Create The Uniqueness Of Xylouris White

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History in indie rock usually operates in the realm of the fairly recent. When a band plays a Big Star or Karen Dalton cover or gets Steve Albini to record an album, it harkens back to music that’s 20 or 40 years old. Occasionally, someone will do a tune from the ’20s or ’30s. It generally doesn’t get much older than that.

But the duo Xylouris White, which opens for Kurt Vile at New Haven’s College Street Music Hall on Wednesday, Feb. 17, taps into a deeper history, something legitimately ancient.

One half of the group is George Xylouris, who plays lute music from the Greek island of Crete, with a repertoire and tradition tied to dances and festivities that go back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. He comes from a famous musical family from a village in Crete with an extensive music culture. The other half of the pair is Jim White, the Australian indie rock drummer from the group Dirty Three, who has also worked with people like Cat Power, Will Oldham and many others.

Xylouris White doesn’t play traditional Cretan music, exactly. There’s no drum kit in the traditional music of Crete, and Xylouris White improvises some of its material. But you still know that you’re in the presence of something deeply rooted in the past when you hear this music. The Cretan lute is akin to the Arabic oud and the European guitar, and its sound straddles an East/West divide as well.

The duo’s debut album, “Goats,” came out in 2014, and they’re in the process of selecting material for their next record, due out in the fall of 2016, from 2015 recording sessions that yielded nearly a hundred songs. White spoke with me by phone from his home in Melbourne, in advance of a run of U.S. tour dates, opening for Vile (as they are in Connecticut) and for Godspeed You! Black Emperor, as well as solo shows.

Xylouris White formed about eight years ago, after Xylouris, who moved to Australia in his 20s, had played with White’s band a number of times, and White had been listening to Cretan music, mostly through his connection to the Xylouris family, for 20 years.

“We made this band up to be ourselves, to be natural, whatever that means,” says White.

White and Xylouris have a special look to them —- lots of curly flowing hair and mustache action at work. They might remind you of more suave and hirsute versions of the characters Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly played in the movie “Step Brothers.”

The music of Xylouris White is both ominous and strangely peaceful. There’s lots of space, and a solidity, but also a vaguely spooky presence. It’s a little like walking into an old, dilapidated, Romanesque cathedral, something worn by centuries but still standing. It’s airy and dark, mournful and ecstatic at the same time. Ornate details comes into focus out of the haze. Xylouris plucks out a flurry of trills on the lute strings, and White provides a clicking or booming accent — using rims, sticks, resonant drum heads and ringing cymbals.

One could compare Xylouris White to the White Stripes, another duo that turns minimalism into a forceful hammer. But there’s also something akin to free jazz about the music, and it might also suggest the dynamic pairing of improvisers Max Roach and Anthony Braxton, particularly with the ways each player pushes the sound possibilities of his instrument, steeped in tradition but willing to blast past it.

“It’s a two-piece band, and it feels really open,” says White. The instrumentation creates a degree of freedom for both players. Xylouris can improvise or take off on tangents on the lute without creating any harmonic chaos.

“The lute has so many sounds in it, as well,” says White. If the lute in Cretan music is traditionally given an accompanying role, here Xylouris gives the instrument a solo turn.

Likewise, if Xylouris plays a metrical pattern or phrases that suggest a regular pulsation, White can be freed up to depart from a strict time-keeping role, which can hobble many drummers in other settings.

“George is just such a master of rhythm,” says White. “We can swap. He’s so subtle about it as well as just so strong about it.”

The lute, with its paired strings, and the attack of the vulture-feather-quill plectrum that Xylouris sometimes uses makes the instrument percussive, with haunting overtones and a broad sonic spectrum.

Seeing Xylouris White at an indie rock bill might be wonderfully intense. In other settings — at solo shows, or when they play to a largely Greek audience, the pair might play for several hours. But in a context like the New Haven appearance, White says, the shows are more dynamic and focused — “a bit more succinct.” This music is likely to pound when cranked through an excellent PA. And yet the dramatic gaps in the music, the peculiar sonorities, are all bound to confound some listeners as well.

“It’s a special kind of pleasure to play to an audience that doesn’t know what to expect,” says White. “There’s no preconceptions. I love it.”

XYLOURIS WHITE, opening for Kurt Vile, play the College Street Music Hall, 238 College St., New Haven, 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 17. $22. 203-867-2000, collegestreetmusichall.com