Brian Pyle is well-known for his enterprising shamanism as one half of Nor Cal improv gurus Starving Weirdos but when off-roading in his Ensemble Economique buggy he seems to stumble on to even weirder psychogenic artifacts. Psychical is Pyle’s freshest full-length and easily his most drugged and dense. Thick, humid banks of synth-fog descend over looped cult hand-drum patterns, strangely panned waves of brainwash tones, and snippets of third world voices mumbling about blood and marijuana. As the name half-jokingly implies, EE is 100% Pyle’s creation intrument-wise, although his wife Phoenix does intone some possessed doom poetry over the crushing war drums of “Forever Eyes” and Tom Carter (of Charalambides) cameos with some searing white light guitar shrapnel on the creep-out raga of “Real Things.” All the pieces dissolve into one another, giving Psychical a dark-trip soundtrack mood, an upriver lost soul convoy into hostile off-radar territories, a thousand spectral voices misting down like a blackening monsoon. A total haunter, and an LP we’ve been spinning many midnights around NNF HQ. Black vinyl LPs in jackets with occult VHS artwork by Manda Beth Brown. Edition of 470.

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