PSYCHIC ILLS & GIBBY HAYNES | Album Review — ‘FRKWYS 4.5: Nowhere in the Night’
Psychic Ills originated in 2003 when Tres Warren and Elizabeth Hart first jammed guitar and bass over a Roland TR-707 drum machine in New York City. The 2006 album Early Violence, compiling the band’s first single and EP, blends crunchy riffs, sleeping-pill vocals, and coldly assertive beats with tasteful fuzz, feedback and delay. The music conjures the vibe of a rainy city — urgent, exciting, despairing. Drummer Brian Tamborello and guitarist/keyboardist Tom Gluibizzi joined for proper debut LP Dins, also released in 2006 on The Social Registry label. The album hits hard, but awkwardly alternates between formless jamming and measured songcraft. The nadirs are abrupt, the climaxes shaky — too tense for psychedelic rock.
Mirror Eye, released in 2009, abandons rock contrivance, wholly devoted to trippiness. Gritty modulations, minimal melodies and Eastern percussion create a cavernous atmosphere. Voices hover, echo but rarely produce language — better to not intellectualize the journey. An overlooked album of swirling, buzzing brilliance. Psychic Ills toured Mirror Eye with legendary freak-rockers Butthole Surfers, forming a personal and musical connection with frontman Gibby Haynes along the way.
RVNG Intl.’s FRKWYS is a series of collaborations between contemporary and veteran musicians. For FRKWYS Vol. 4, Psychic Ills invited Haynes to remix Mirror Eye’s pulsing centerpiece “I Take You as My Wife Again”. He added layers of squiggly noises, increasing a sense of insectile menace to the track. The band and Haynes then spent a night in February, 2010 recording at Brooklyn’s Monster Island studio — one six hour improvisation ending at 4:00 a.m. Warren edited the material down to thirty minutes over eight distinct tracks and shelved the album until he passed away in 2020. In June 2022, Hart consented to release the album as FRKWYS Vol. 4.5.
Nowhere in the Night is the evil twin to Mirror Eye. Whereas the latter gives a flickering light by which the listener can spelunk, the former is the darkness when they emerge above ground. Opener “No Way” starts with a heavy growling sound, fly-zapper buzzing, controlled feedback like the yawning of some malefic alien. Haynes enters, repeating “there’s no way, there’s no way” over and over, erratic percussion accenting the dread. Warren’s shivering guitar plays a few high notes, like a bird of prey taunting the doomed listener. If there is no way, what will happen next?
The ten-minute “At Long Last” features a slowly oscillating tone, like a portal with undulating walls. A mesmerizing guitar line and marching drums focus attention. Circular, repetitive, a real couch-melter. The track violently segues into “Clone”: driving drums, moaning bass, echoing feedback and Haynes’ mad mumbles and gasps. “Schizo Fez” loops distant wails over a shambling beat. “Shakin’” is the sound of a steady jog through a dark wood, hand percussion and humming electronics like deep breaths and a beating heart, Haynes’ baying like surrounding phantoms.
“Lude” brings to mind a derelict infirmary reclaimed by evil beings. Moldy, stinking guitar lines, ritualistic drums, an electronic whooshing sound as from an old medical machine. Haynes sounds at his most narcotized, as if lulled onto an operating table before a terrible surgery. “Something Like That” tightens things up with a krautrock rhythm and some truly gone riffing; the perfect air for Haynes’ distorted messages. The closer “Where’s the Beginning?” is the sound of exhaustion, the druggy comedown. A whirring noise, single-note guitar bending, dopey harmonica, tepid drumming, drained vocals. A fitting end for a project that started as a spontaneous, six-hour experiment. Nowhere in the Night is special because there was no agenda to it other than to jam — pure, unpretentious improvisation from an intensely creative group of individuals. A thrilling, fascinating listen.
Psychic Ills changed their sound for the rest of their career to a more traditional folk-rock style starting with 2011’s Hazed Dream. The Mirror Eye era, including Nowhere in the Night and EPs Astral Occurrence, Catoptric and Telesthetic Tape, is exceptional. If there’s a thin line between delirium and ego-death, Psychic Ills walks it. Sometimes it’s more interesting to look into a mirror with a murky reflection than to see with crystal clarity.
