It's Not Night: It's Space

New Paltz-based instrumental psychedelic adventurers It’s Not Night: It’s Space (INNIS) play a dense, meditative, generally slow-pulse rock with occult underpinnings expressed in the song titles, the designs and the occasional spoken-word sample. It is raw but strangely euphonious, palpable music with a deep pocket and a transportive effect. INNIS is also the latest local outfit to turn to the Kickstarter model to finance its proposed full-length recording project.

What is Kickstarter? Remember when all the biggest, most powerful and wealthiest performers in North American music banded together in the ‘80s to instruct their fans to save, feed and just kind of be the world? And we did? It’s like that, but different. With Kickstarter, do-it-yourself artists appeal to the masses as to a collective, populist patron: a donor as bottomless as any Bill Gates or Cosimo de’ Medici, but a little more “facey” and distributed.

Supporters pledge any amount at the Kickstarter project webpage. The funds are only withdrawn (money-handling courtesy of Amazon) if the project meets its stated goal within a timed interval – in this case the prim, shoestring $5,000 that really is required to record, package and distribute a serious CD these days by June 14. The timed all-or-nothing terms lead to campaigns of escalating frenzy. It is a great motivator, though one might wonder how many campaigns can be run in a region before the target population gets a bit tapped and wearied. Remember, this is the same wealthy omni-patron who stopped buying records, cold, about ten years ago.

INNIS has set up a tiered system of incentives and rewards that range from digital download of the album at the low end up to an in-house performance for the platinum-circle donors – such as, say, Dr. and Mrs. Lawrence Pennybrooke and the Lamb Foundation. Of special interest is the limited-run vinyl pressing of the album, which can be had starting at the $25 plateau. In this way, Kickstarter can be seen as a glorified advance order system. Kickstarter and Amazon, of course, get their piece.

The INNIS project has online and offline branches. On June 4 at 8 p.m., INNIS will be holding a Full Moon and Venus Transit potluck and acoustic performance and a community discussion about astrology and divination hosted by “Are You Experienced?” a monthly public dialogue held by Simon Thrasher of the Hudson Galaxy Gazette. Two local artists will be showing short documentaries on New Paltz folklore and astrological synchronicity. The event will be held at the Elting Memorial Library in New Paltz.

As intriguing as the discussion and films sound, the real mystery is what INNIS – a typically high-wattage concern – will sound like acoustic. My guess: They make it work. So let’s be the world again and help this good band make a record.

The Elting Memorial Library is located at 93 Main Street in New Paltz. Learn more about INNIS’ Kickstarter campaign (and hear/see the band) at www.kickstarter.com/projects/innis/its-not-night-its-space-and-their-first-lp. - Hudson Valley Almanac Weekly

Jamming their fucking faces off for the pure love of music is what this band is all about. You can sense the raw passion and unbridled energy they breathe into everything that they do. Without lyrics, It's Not Night, It's Space is able to get their point across by a substantially heavy use of drifting psychedelic interludes and crushing guitar chords. As they say, the music speaks for itself. Check this killer band out today and if you like what you hear, support them on their recent Kickstarter campaign. Check out the video below for more info. - Heavy Planet

It’s Not Night: It’s Space are an instrumental band from New Paltz, NY. Their debut EP titled East of the Sun & West of the Moon is just under 30 minutes of spaced out psychedelic hard rock. It’s something that you have to listen to. Take my word for it. - The Soda Shop

If the name It’s Not Night: It’s Space immediately illustrates a cosmically inclined approach to music in your mind, we can only recommend you take your protein pills and put your helmet on … and pick up the “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” EP in a solar flash.

As evidenced by the opening seven-minute space-seance, “Moon Goose,” the approach of INN:IS is not without gravitational pull. To the cosmic contrary, the three-piece band deals in the heavier side of psychedelic sound, unafraid to dive headlong into the darkness. The rhythm of the song lumbers forward with some degree of menace and soon finds its way toward shepherding all manner of hypnotic, amplified wizardry. Despite it’s title and temperament, the song is no ugly duckling, and the alternating dirge and drive of the melodies explored within brings to mind a legendary leading of rats as much as any lunar lunacy.

In this way, INN:IS will appeal to the inner-space explorers and pioneers as much as those whose discoveries are tethered to telescopes and umbilical cables. Appropriate then that the next song on the EP – an even longer, even more menacing moon march – is titled “V.I.T.R.I.O.L.” Don’t ask us what it means or what it stands for – but it certainly sounds like intergalactic vitriol.

There comes a clue as to what exactly it is that It’s Not Not: It’s Space stands for and their notions of inner and outer space exploration at the end of the “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” on a drone and found-soundscape titled “I Amness.” Through the void of space we hear the words of our old friend and fellow spaceman “Ticklish” Terence McKenna, offering the cosmic truth that “no one is in control.” In space, no one can hear you lose your mind – and if they could, odds are they wouldn’t care. But if you care to lose yours, INN:IS can provide an accurate map to the stars. - Revolt of the Apes

Trio It’s Not Night: It’s Space make their introduction with East of the Sun & West of the Moon, a four cut EP that takes up residence in the space between said bodies. Logically, if you keep going east and keep going west, you’re eventually going to meet up. I think…INN:IS give it a shot and meet up at sweet spot between the reach of space/psych rock and the slow-burn of stoner rock’s heft. East one way and west in the other; there are a lot of miles to cover in there and INN:IS don’t blow all the fuel during launch. East of the Sun & West of the Moon moves at a deliberate pace, a march almost in many spots, pushing forward and upward, with plenty of drive in the engine room. Focusing on what goes on once you’re up, and staying up, East/West opens up as you get in, revealing more as the stars go by the driver side window. The heavy rooted side of the mission gives INN:IS a grounded urge that should appeal to voyagers who want to keep at least one foot on terra firma while checking their compass direction. Describing their flight plan in the Kingston/New Paltz Times, guitarist Kevin Halcott summed it up saying, “We’re interested in mysticism and abstract ideas, but we also have an appreciation of natural forms…A kind of earthiness, maybe.” Indeed…and that earthiness has its own tectonics with INN:IS often sounding like they’re chewing up some of their own tail in the grind for the energy to shift those masses around. It’s a great intro EP that stands on its own, and promises a much deeper campaign on the next flight, in either direction. - mr. atavist

The loose collection of subgenres flying under the space rock banner varies widely, and could be as whimsical and exploratory as early Pink Floyd or as hypnotic as the finely honed legendary German ensemble Can. Often though, the best space rock demands a meditative concentration and focus, rewarding the listener with a wonderfully interactive music that is very spiritual in a courageous way. This is a rough and ragged whirlwind of repetitive sound that pulls off the accomplishment of sounding incredibly heavy and nimble at the same time. The sometimes illusive dichotomy came to mind while listening to the New Paltz trio It’s Not Night: It’s Space.

The band’s debut EP is a deep recording that often brings up the rise and fall of tones and emotions common to meditative sittings. Guitar player Kevin Halcott, drummer Michael Lutomski, and bassist Tommy Guerrero play with a truly unified intensity. The opening track, “I Amness,” is an undulating sound collage inhabited by thunderstorms, tribal chanting, and disembodied quotes from the psychedelic philosopher Terrence Kemp McKenna, former World Wrestling Champion Hulk Hogan, and the polymath Robert Anton Wilson’s quote “We’re trapped in linguistic constructs…all that is metaphor.” The band goes on to spend the rest of the CD proving that last assertion wrong, though, as the wordless compositions speak volumes over tribal-bass drumbeats, an armada of distortion effects, unexpectedly funky break beats, and the concise focus of what the band terms its “heavy raga-roll drone journeys to the depths of inner & outer space.” Innis.bandcamp.com. - Chronogram Magazine