Indie psych rock act, Ancient River is the brainchild of the Gainesville, FL-based singer/songwriter and guitarist James Barreto. The band can trace its origins to 200 when Barreto was a member of the DIY and improvisational, instrumental psych act, The Ohm. Over the next few years, the band recorded several albums worth of material on a 4-track tape recorder with Barreto collecting and refining components of what would wind up becoming a burgeoning home studio. And interestingly while starting his own project, Barreto started recording and producing the output of several local bands and scoring a number of local independent films – and during that period, the singer/songwriter, guitarist and producer started Ancient River.

It took another two years before Barreto started performing Ancient River material backed with psychedelic visuals. Alex Cordova was recruited to join the project in 2011 and the band started writing material and started some rather busy touring, including appearances at Austin Psych Fest, Los Angeles’ Psycho De Mayo, Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia – and they’ve opened for the likes of Dead Skeletons, Heartless Bastards, Night Beats, Ringo Deathstarr and others.

“This Is The Time,” the first single off their soon-to-be released effort, Keeper of the Dawn is a trippy, lo-fi bit of psych rock comprised of guitars played through generous amounts of reverb, crashing cymbals paired with vocals that are deeply buried with a mix that sounds as though it were recorded on dusty analog in a similar fashion to Raccoon Fighter and countless others – but while possessing a cosmic glow that ripples and undulates towards the listener.

You can catch the band on a lengthy national tour to support Keeper of the Dawn this spring – and it’ll include a May 29 stop at King’s County Saloon.