What do you do when you can do whatever you want?

The members of Lyons, Colorado’s Taarka would never claim musical omnipotence. Still, that’s a question they must have asked themselves when they formed their acoustic quartet. The husband-and-wife team of David Tiller on mandolin and Enion Pelta-Tiller on five-string violin grew up playing everything from classical music to rock ’n’ roll. Daniel Plane also studied classical music, as is the norm for cellists, but he was never shy about more popular forms. And while bassist Troy Robey is a dyed-in-the-wool jazz buff, he’s maintained a parallel interest in bluegrass.

The only natural response to such diverse interests, Tiller says, is to let the music dictate its own course.

“That’s just the way it works,” he explains, on the line from his “second home” of Portland, Oregon. “We meet in the middle, I guess.”

Tiller adds that his band’s eclectic style is the natural result of growing up with access to all kinds of different sounds. “If you grow up in a Gypsy family in Romania, you know Romanian Gypsy music,” he notes. “If you grow up in the United States—or Canada, for that matter—you’re going to end up being a cluster of your influences, a musical cluster.”

Judging by Taarka’s fourth CD, Seed Gathering for a Winter Garden, the four performers are drawn equally to backwoods fiddle tunes, the avant-garde acoustic music pioneered by mandolinist David Grisman, storytelling singer-songwriters, and the swinging jazz of Django Reinhardt. At times, however, there seems to be a rock band lurking just underneath the surface—especially on “A Whole New You” and “The Legend”.

“That’s true, without a doubt,” Tiller says. “A Whole New You”, he explains, was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek attempt to write something that Portland’s notoriously insular indie scene might like, while “The Legend” is a tip of the hat to guest vocalist Nathan Moore.

“Enion and I used to be in a group called ThaMuseMeant with him,” the mandolinist reveals. “Nathan’s an absolutely brilliant singer-songwriter. He’s also the most prolific singer-songwriter I’ve ever known. He writes tons of songs every week, all the time. He’s an amazingly intense and beautiful artist.”

Tiller doesn’t rule out future collaborations with his old bandmate, but for now he’s trying to figure out where Taarka’s heading next.

“I’ve had this fantasy lately of trying to make an acoustic hippie techno record—having acoustic instruments imitate house and techno rhythm forms, and then adding a fiddle-tune or Gypsy-esque element to it,” he says, laughing. “That’s been on my mind the past few days, so who knows?”

Taarka plays a free concert at the Vancouver Art Gallery plaza at noon on Tuesday (August 4) as part of MusicFest Vancouver.