There are funk-metal bands, and there are funk bands with metal elements and vice-versa.

And then there’s Portland guitar shredder Scott Pemberton’s song “Move,” found on his latest studio album, 2015’s “Timber Rock,” which somehow manages to incorporate two distinct genres at once. No hyperbolic “from funk to metal in the space of one song” here — Pemberton layers a crisp, stuttering funk riff over insistent, chugging power chords for a sound that’s not quite one or the other. Pemberton called it “trying to combine something like Helmet and something like Prince at the same time.”

“The way that we construct the music in the live show, it’s often constructed differently because there’s all these layers — there’s layers that I’ll hear where it could be a metal layer on this, say the skeleton’s undergarments, but then you’ve got a funk outfit on top of that,” Pemberton said recently from home. “I can just see these different layers or dimensions that the music can have, and then I’ll just choose which one we’re doing right then. And so a song like (‘Move’), I’m like, well, let’s just do them both at the same time. A lot of times, that’s where a lot of my music will skate through a whole bunch of different textures and styles on the same song, even within the same song.”

Pemberton has played in jazz bands, logged sessions with famed Portland drummer Mel Brown and funk legend Bernard Purdie and counts blues belter Curtis Salgado and Los Lobos saxophonist Steve Berlin as collaborators, helping to explain his almost schizophrenic sound (also self-categorized, naturally, as “timber rock”). It’s a sound that’s ingratiated the guitarist to Central Oregon and local promoter Parallel 44 Presents, which brought his band to the 4 Peaks Music Festival last month and will again welcome him to town Wednesday as part of Parrilla Grill’s Show Us Your Spokes concert series.

“It seems like some of our strongest towns are towns where people like to get out and do stuff — you know, the active sports, hikers and kayakers and people ready to come down and rock,” Pemberton said. “It’s a high-energy music that’s fun for dancing, and sometimes it’s chill, but it’s good for people who are ready to come out and get after it, and the Bend crowd seems to almost always be ready. You could even take out the ‘almost.’”

The guitarist’s genre experiments would be enough to make him stand out on the touring circuit, but then there’s his unorthodox playing style.

Pemberton never uses a guitar strap, and his onstage juggling of the instrument is mentioned in nearly every online biography or interview written about him. One moment he’s holding it up high to his chest like a jazz player, the next he’s dangling the instrument below his hips, or balancing it on the stool he always brings onstage to play it like a piano or a percussion instrument.

“In every town there’s always some people that are like, ‘What — what is happening right now?’” Pemberton said. “Because it is different, and people are often — it’s something that people are curious about, and I am too. The guitar has evolved to be played how people play it with the guitar strap, and my evolution on the guitar, it just evolved away from the guitar strap. I tried to use it for a while, but I found it to be more of a hindrance than a tool, and it became annoying.”

Pemberton grew up in a strict religious household — his parents were members of the evangelical Church of the Nazarene — and called it “kind of an interesting ‘Footloose’ environment” with no pop culture. Nevertheless, Pemberton was drawn to what music he did hear at friends’ houses, starting with Jimi Hendrix and moving to jazz and Afrobeat. Though he butted heads with his parents over music, they bought him his first electric guitar when he was 16.

By age 21, Pemberton was teaching guitar at Lewis & Clark College and Reed College, according to his website. He ran a recording studio and did production work for artists, as well as playing recording sessions and sitting in with groups as a freelance jazz guitarist.

Around 2010, Pemberton suffered a traumatic brain injury in a bicycle accident in Portland, which almost killed him. During the intense recovery period, he relearned guitar (this is where the stool onstage came from — he would often need to sit down while in recovery). He was already starting to move away from session work and teaching in favor of leading his own band, but the accident gave him an extra push.

“Being so broken as I was, literally I couldn’t work at all or do anything for maybe six months or something — I don’t remember exactly how long that was, but it was a while,” he said. “And then having to also just do my recovery — gradually rebuild what it is that I want to do — it was the perfect little petri dish for me to get something like this going.”

Since then, Pemberton has released four solo albums, including his studio debut “Sugar Mama” and “Timber Rock,” produced by Berlin. He’s currently working on a new album with the Los Lobos saxophonist, whom he met in one of Matt Butler’s impromptu Everyone Orchestra groups at a festival.

“(Berlin) and also Curtis Salgado in the early days were encouraging me to start touring,” Pemberton said. “They were like, ‘You know, if you took this on the road — if people could hear this, I think they’re really gonna like it.’ That’s what both those guys were telling me independently, and I was like, oh. I respect both those guys so much, I’m kind of like, OK, let’s give it a shot.”