Tectonic plates shudder and shift. Mile-high mountains crumble and tumble into the churning ocean. The sun's blinding aura flashes and radiates with a searing haze. The galaxy expands and contracts, its trillions of stars swirling and scattering like some kind of cosmic confetti. A great, universal scream rises up, building and building to a peak of nightmarish climax. But somehow, in the middle of everything, there's a calm. A steady pulse. An infinite, eternal om. All of this is likely going on in your head as you experience the music of New Paltz-area trio It's Not Night: It's Space. In fact, you're more or less forced to invent the storyline when you do: The band's brand of loud, out-there psychedelic hard rock is entirely instrumental.
"At gigs we still get asked if we need a singer, all the time," says drummer Michael Lutomski. "I guess we've never totally ruled it out, but we've never felt like we needed one."
"To me, lyrics would be a distraction," bassist Tommy Guerrero adds. "As it is, there's a lot of imagery already there in the music."
Both the imagery and the music that serves as its canvas have been growing for some time, and are still revealing themselves. As It's Not Night: It's Space—or INN:IS, the band's own abbreviation—Lutomski, Guerrero, and guitar player Kevin Halcott have been wrecking minds since 2010. The group began with Lutomski and Halcott playing open mikes as a duo; soon another guitarist (since departed) and a bassist were added, with Guerrero eventually replacing the latter. Amid plying its sounds at local and Downstate venues, the outfit debuted in late 2011 with a four-song, half-hour EP, East of the Sun & West of the Moon (Independent). Adding to the experience of the threesome's inherently vivid sonic vistas is its frequent use of trippy visual projections. "Whether or not we do the projections depends on the setup at the venue," explains Lutomski. "Lately, what we've been concentrating on more is adding in ambient electronics and sample loops, mostly between the songs."
Somehow the combined academic backgrounds of the members, all one-time SUNY students, fits perfectly. Lutomski's master's degree in English is reflected in the titles and poetic feel of the songs, while Guerrero's studies in environmental science seem analogous to the music's overpoweringly tangible atmosphere. And then there's Halcott's time as—wait for it—a psych major. "Actually, lately I've been on a 'radical sabbatical' from academia," says the guitarist, newly a student of Astron Argon, the magical order created in 1907 by Aleister Crowley and George Cecil Jones. "I want to get into counseling work, but I feel like I need to get to know my head before I can help others. So right now for me it's more about purely spiritual studies. But, yeah, I think psychology relates to our music in that both are dedicated to the unknown potential of things."
Halcott grew up on Long Island and began his parallel career in rock 'n' roll before he was old enough to shave. "I got into hardcore when I was really young," he says. "I was playing in bars in bands when I was 12 years old." One of these outfits was Sick of Talk, with whom he made two seven-inches and toured before the band split up. Lutomski was reared in Rockland County, and got his start behind the kit at home. "My dad had played drums for fun when he was a kid, and his drum set was up in our attic," explains the percussionist, whose tastes in high school—Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young—are audible in the sound of INN:IS, his first-ever band. "I started bugging him to bring the drums down and let me try to play them, and after about two months of that he finally did." The dreadlocked Guerrero hails from the Dominican Republic, where his uncle's Jefferson Airplane, Rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd albums first caught his ear. "I wanted so bad to learn how to play guitar that I made a deal with this kid I knew who played: I bought a guitar and told him he could keep it if he taught me how to play," Guerrero says, adding, with a laugh, "so that's what he did. And I had to give him the guitar, which made me a little sad at the time." While his mentor went on to play with several domestically huge pop rock acts, the bassist himself became further inspired by the music of US punk labels SST and Dischord. And what was the Dominican punk scene like back then? "Well, there wasn't really a punk scene," he says. "Unless you call a bunch of kids listening to records and moshing in someone's living room a scene."
Making the leap from the linear, more tightly structured style of hardcore punk to the free-ranging, wide-open approach of psychedelia may seem incongruous to casual listeners. After all, wasn't supplanting the untethered excesses of the hippie-rock era part of punk's original intent? Actually, the two genres have more in common than one might realize on first blush. Both are committed to railing hard against the confines of commerciality and to being musically bold, trying new things that find the players as well as the audience living in the moment. So internally, then, punk and psych are similar beasts. They just tend to move in different ways on the outside. And when the outside is built on heavy blocks of sludgy, Sabbathy stoner metal, as is the case with INN:IS, the differences are, shall we say, blurred even more.
Psychedelia, of course, began in the mid 1960s, when rock and folk rock musicians began integrating rambling elements of free jazz, avant-garde, and Middle Eastern music into their sounds and experimenting more heavily with electronic effects and exotic instrumentation. Leading the way were US bands like the 13th Floor Elevators, Country Joe & the Fish, the Byrds, and the Grateful Dead and their UK-based counterparts like Pink Floyd, the Beatles, Cream, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. By the early '70s, the style had morphed into the ambitious but flawed movement known as progressive rock, whose artistic credibility-pandering practitioners (Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake and Palmer) seemed bent on sucking the soul out of psychedelia; at roughly the same time in Germany, however, the critic-named Krautrock scene flourished as bands like Can, Neu!, Tangerine Dream, and others modernized psych rock by adding hypnotic synthesizers and emphasizing its pulsing drones. Since then, a new generation has taken flight, one that references the classic 1967-72 psych template, but is also largely indebted to late '80s/early '90s British drone rock-supreme unit Spacemen 3. This wave includes current acts like Bardo Pond, the Black Angels, Dead Meadow, Black Mountain, and Wooden Shjips, all of whom have left their fuzzy residue on INN:IS.
Evidence of these influences permeates the band's newly unveiled album, Bowing Not Knowing to What (Independent). Currently out on CD and being readied for vinyl release this month, the record was funded last spring by a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. "[The campaign] was crazy, we're still not sure how it worked so well," jokes Lutomski, shaking his head in mock disbelief. "Of course, there were friends and local fans who contributed, but there were a also lot of total strangers, people in Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, who made some very generous donations." And the donors can rest assured, knowing their money has been well spent: The disc's epic, sprawling tracks—"The Magus in the Valley," "Blue Mountain Freedom," "Palace of the Bees," and four others—will have them in full lysergic bliss as they nod their heads in time with the crawling tempos. "At one show we did a little while ago, some guy yelled out, 'You guys sound like acid!'" says the drummer, laughing.
Which brings us to the drug thing. To many, psychedelic music and the drug experience from which it derives its name are inseparable. You have to be high to get it, they believe. Not necessarily, Halcott asserts. "People assume that drugs go hand-in-hand with the music, but I don't believe drugs are necessary [to play or appreciate it]," he says.
Guerrero concurs. "The mood, the way the melodies weave together over the beats—yes, those things mimic the effects of LSD or marijuana," says the bassist. "But in my opinion our music seeks to approach those feelings without relying on drugs."
Also in agreement is local neopsych queen Shana Falana, who contributes soaring, wordless vocals on Bowing Not Knowing to What. "I remember the first time I saw [the band], it was such a huge wash of sound that I just felt totally altered," says the singer. "Being sober, it was great to feel high and not actually be stoned. [Laughs.] Now I go to see them every chance I get." (Falana was profiled in the May 2012 issue of Chronogram.)
As the trio does East Coast dates over the winter, the members are looking forward to hitting the road at length in the summer. "[In the Hudson Valley] we tend to play with a lot of metal bands, because there aren't really many heavy psych bands around here," Lutomski says. "It's not always an ideal fit, but we can roll with it." INN:IS has been doing its best to enlighten the locals, however, by setting up shared area shows with kindred bands from Brooklyn's renowned contemporary psych scene. Taking a cue from Texas's popular annual Austin Psych Fest, the group's ultimate aim is to stage a New Paltz festival of like-minded acts.
The title of Bowing Not Knowing to What, Lutomski explains, comes from a line in W. S. Merwin's "For the Anniversary of My Death." A self-mourning meditation on loss and the value of overlooked, seemingly small things, the poem reflects on the author's (and all of our) fleeting earthly existence—with the implication that what is truly beloved is yet to be discovered.
"In the end psychedelia is about dissolving boundaries, about getting out of the reality tunnel and seeing things in their naked form," says Lutomski. "That's when progress happens."
Bowing Not Knowing to What is out on CD now. It's Not Night: It's Space will headline a vinyl release party for the album at Snug Harbor in New Paltz on February 9 with special guests Dead Empires and Moon Tooth. Innis.bandcamp.com.