Dan Greene, sometimes of the Mountain Movers, cast a dislocating spell on a rapt audience at the Institute Library Saturday night, with a tremolo guitar and his echo-drenched voice. He was singing a song about a usual habit, of meeting friends downtown and hanging out in parking lots. But one night, he sang, “was different because / I didn’t know where I was.” The eerie sense of unease tipped into the surreal. “We all turned into birds / and flew over the town / we turned back into wolves / when we touched the ground.” Had they been wolves all along?
The moment was one of many that combined the off-kilter and the sublime as Greene, cellist Lori Goldston, and New Haven folk legend Kath Bloom shared a bill at the Institute Library, in which sharp lyrics, supple musicianship, and a taste for the experimental combined.
Greene kicked off the show with a short, mesmerizing set of songs that he said were a mix of old and new — some as new as this week, songs he’d barely played and never before in public. He created a hazy vibe, soothing even as it disoriented, filling the space of the library’s reading room. The respectful audience waited each time until the last note had shimmered away before they started clapping, meaning that, as Greene seamlessly moved from one song to another, sometimes they blended together, as if part of a larger whole.
Greene built the mood slowly, layer by layer, song by song; satisfyingly, he then ended it abruptly by turning off his amplifier with a sharp pop.
