"We've been waiting around a long time for a tribute group — we thought we'd just do it ourselves," chuckled Mike Heron, the guileless 61-year-old Scottish co-founder of the Incredible String Band, before launching into another song from the ISB's heydaze, that sparkling period of 1967 through '69 when they released six albums of boldly expansionist, fantastically charming psychedelic folk music to fair commercial success and open awe from other musicians (including the Stones, Hendrix, the Who, the Beatles and soon-to-be members of Led Zeppelin).

While some bands from that period were so far ahead of their time that it took years for their accomplishments to be fully
appreciated — the Velvet Underground, the MC5, etc. — the ISB seemed to stand outside time altogether, in that non-electric utopia of communal exploration that always exists but is rarely well-documented. Multi-instrumentalists all, they had different channels open, and their songs still work an intoxicating, timeless magic.

Tonight, after a lovely set of chamber folk by the Philadelphia six-piece Espers that wowed a sold-out audience that included Will Oldham, we got all the stuff that made ISB so incredible, though from an incomplete line-up. (Co-founder Robin Williamson is currently doing solo work; the trio now includes banjoist Clive Palmer, a co-founder who departed after the very first album, and an up-for-it Lawson Dando doing yeoman's service.) The potion: pan-cultural instrumentation, sweet music-hall/folk ditties (especially Heron's The Hedgehog Song and Painting Box), Palmer's wry blues-folk country rambles, and the 12-minute reality survey that is A Very Cellular Song. On the last, Heron sang, "Oh ah ee oo there's absolutely no strife/living the timeless life," with a smile that seemed a simple expression of joy — the joy of singing something that was still so fundamentally true.