Presence is Gardener’s gift. The hard to pin, ever evolving, music project of Dash Lewis—half-way through its second decade, and ninth year based in Richmond—is ready for a new era, and requests your presence. [Full disclosure: Lewis is an occasional contributor to Style Weekly as a freelance music writer, mostly covering hip-hop].

After a season away from performing, Gardener will debut new material next week, when he opens for BASIC. That group is the peak collaboration between heavyweight instrumentalists Chris Forsyth (Solar Motel Band), Douglas McCombs (Tortoise) and Mikel Patrick Avery (Natural Information Society).

Lewis describes them as “’80s guitar psych, kind of like High Life guitar stuff, but also real Motorik,” when we meet up at Get Tight Lounge to talk shop. I’ve been listening to their new album “This Is BASIC” compulsively and appreciate Lewis’s take, nailing down what that group, in fact, is. “I was flattered that they asked me to open [the show]. I haven’t played in a while,” Lewis adds.

In essence, Gardener is a singer. But instead of using words, Lewis accompanies his voice with modular synth and an array of pedal orchestration to create a soundtrack in the moment. It’s a liminal space between vocal and instrumental music. Atmospheric for sure, but never absent or suited for the background.

“I have this guiding philosophy of not trying to command attention but to become your attention,” he explains. “It can be a very glacial, slow moving composition that morphs and changes and we are in a completely different place at the end than where we started.”

That’s not to say it’s ever passive or the least bit boring.

“It might get really cathartic, so I might sing really loudly. Sometimes it feels like an exorcism, and sometimes it feels like trying to create a calm pool of sound. So that’s one of the things that I find exciting about this project. There’s a framework but then, within that framework, there’s a lot of freedom to figure out what happens every night that I play.”

Lewis thrives on retaining this spontaneity and personal touch in his music, weary of artifice and boilerplate. A synthesizer enthusiast who has worked for a synth company, Lewis communes with the instrument deeply, and to such a degree, it’s fruitless to untangle where one ends and the other begins.

“Depending on how you use them, it can sap the humanity out of what you’re doing,” he says. “For me, part of keeping the voice in there is that there is a person that is creating this. I like to look at the synth as all these little circuits are having a conversation with each other, and then I’m having a conversation with them.” Similarly, he refrains from leaning too hard on his tools so as to reduce his own role in Gardener. “Especially if you do atmospheric synthesizer music, there’s a tendency to lean really heavy on delay and reverb,” he concedes. “I’ve been trying to back away from that and see how I can create texture and size without just making everything a shoegaze band.”

Even without lyrics, this music delivers a message. Or many, as it’s received by listeners.  Lewis cites a large choir he heard as a kid in Durham, North Carolina going to church at Duke University’s large stone chapel. Despite being in Latin or German, the choral effect was evocative. Now, he hopes Gardener is able to “connect with people in a way that feels visceral, emotional and maybe intuitive. You just get hit with these waves of sound and maybe it makes the person next to you feel something different than what you’re feeling but you’re all feeling something.”

“Things are incredibly stressful in a way that a lot of us alive have not dealt with before,” he says, forecasting his new material. “There’s potential it could get gnarlier than what I’ve done in the past.”

At different points, Lewis describes Gardener as an exorcism and therapy. For his part, there is a catharsis in his alchemy of sounds. “When I get done with a show, I always feel drained because I’m drawing from a well of thought and emotion that maybe I haven’t processed fully or maybe I didn’t know was there.”

If you’ve read this far, I trust it’s evident Lewis and his work are mindful. I try and fail to get at what his songs are actually about, as if I haven’t heard a thing he’s said. Even if the music is deeply personal to Lewis, its meaning gets rediscovered with every performance, in real time. But that’s not to say Lewis is living under a rock, emerging only to perform and retreat to his practice space. Rather, Gardener is grown from the world Lewis inhabits.

“Things are incredibly stressful in a way that a lot of us alive have not dealt with before,” he says, forecasting his new material. “There’s potential it could get gnarlier than what I’ve done in the past.” Likewise, Lewis points to the residue of Richmond’s history, in addition to its humidity, for producing a wealth of heavy music that informs meatier, low-end dimensions of Gardener’s new territory.

As a lifelong hip-hop fan, that music has been foundational to Lewis’s reliance on rhythm in Gardener, where he’s found much to celebrate in Richmond’s local talent pool. “Nickelus F is legendary, Billy Capricorn, Radio B, and Michael Millions; that whole scene is just like endlessly inspiring,” he says. Meanwhile, you’re just as likely to find a local metal band on a Gardener mood board. “I remember seeing Windhand for the first time and being like ‘I wanna exist in this tone.’”

But if he had his druthers, there’d be more overlap between Richmond’s various genre-based music communities. “All the scenes seem pretty healthy on their own, but I think it would be really wonderful to see much more cross pollination,” he says. “I’d love to play on a bill with Troy or Nickelus F or Ductape Jesus. I’d love to see Opin play with Windhand, that kind of thing.”

Although your presence is requested at Gardener’s next show, Lewis knows its a tall order, what with necessitating you to put down your phone and all.

“It’s very hard to be present, especially in a time like this. And I think that the more that we can work on doing that as individuals, I think we’ll be able to do it better as a collective. Being really present for the art that’s happening in the community is a great way to get to know your community. And community is the most important thing we have right now.”

Gardener opens for BASIC with Bark Culture on March 11 at Richmond Music Hall. Doors are at 7 p.m. and cost $17.