Matt Lawson’s Secret Colors is a psychedelic swirl of washed-out samples, keys, and guitar; it’s music that allows its listeners complete, wide-open freedom—there aren’t even vocals on the songs. “I’ve always felt that the music I make is sort of passive… that adding a voice singing words would make everything too specific, and not as open to interpretation,” Lawson explained to me in an recent email. Lawson recently added visual projections—found footage and his own videos—to complement his sublime live performances, which created a stir at last year’s CMJ Festival—The New York Times featured Secret Colors in their Arts Beat blog, calling it “soothing sounds for babies.” Secret Colors’ latest, Lunar, is gentle and infant-appropriate, but it could also be heard as spacey, dark, and scary—again, it just depends on the listener. “Hopefully the result is something transcendent,” says Lawson. With Flexions, M. Women. ERIN K. THOMPSON

Fri., Feb. 11, 10 p.m., 2011