AN INTERCEPTED TRANSMISSION FROM PSYCHAL
The room is dark; the hum of computers, radios, and machines creates a mechanical snore as they sit waiting. A red light blinks; the room's lights flash on; hard drives breathe to life; fans and algorithms wake the room; radio static fills the space with a fuzzy ambient noise. A transmission crackles through the radio static; something is calling. It's faint, uneasy, and certainly not human. Transmissions by Psychal act as a reverse Voyager 1 & 2: a message from another world reaching out from light-years away. Released on September 11th, the egg punk concept EP is a mystery.
Courtesy of The National Archives Catalog
The EP sticks to a concept that informs its use of lo-fi and synth elements, while incorporating this battery-acid taste into the recordings. Each track moves in and out of static as if someone is turning radio dials, trying to relocate the melodies of whatever is transmitting them. Stumbling upon each track is like Mulder and Scully receiving some mysterious extraterrestrial message. We are in uncharted territory here; even when asking for photos for this piece, I was met with “there are no pictures of the entity.”
Image Courtesy of Psychal
Transmissions takes egg punk into a digital weirdness, playing with the genre's already sci-fi sound but asking, can the it get weirder? Can it get any more undefinable and uneasy for a casual listener? In Psychal’s commitment to craft a recording that feels intercepted, a distinct narrative gives it a framework. Psychal writes on their Bandcamp, “Telepathic sound waves are mental vibrations that don’t travel through air; they abuse the electrical activity of thought itself. These "Psychal" transmissions appear as signals of unknown origin, something like buried formations that were never fully formed, lost in the surrounding electromechanical activity. The message retrieved from the Morse-like code puts everything on the trail of the "Psychal”: an entity, a group, a single mind, or an organism, behind these strange signals. Instead of being heard, they are felt inside the mind, inside those connections, through fried inner hums, drifting rhythms, and explosive fragments of words, which seem to emerge from a space between stable consciousness and chaotic noise.
Courtesy of The National Archives Catalog
When someone manages to tune into these waves, they unfold a psycho image, almost squizophrenic, where sensations are turned into mental crushers, pulverizing any incautious listener. These transmissions don’t follow the normal acoustic spectrum; their frequency is measured in cognitive intensity, packed with harsh emotions, grim connections, and mental obscurities. Maybe the mycelium was always like this, full of barbed wire with scattered spines, where the others just pass on by.”
Its purposeful fumbling of rhythm and melody crafts an EP that is a sci-fi dance party at times, and unsettling at others. In moments, you can feel the need to call out, asking if anyone is out there, as drums and synth spring to life, almost acknowledging your presence. Like stumbling with a TV’s antenna, there is nothing stable about Transmissions; it's gone before you know it, and relocating it is an endeavor. Its appeal is in its ability to play as lost media, or music recorded over a lost message, similar to how one might accidentally tape over their wedding video.
Image Courtesy of Psychal
It's mysterious, but the idea of finding the answer conjures relisten after relisten. Its so strange, and that can feel distinctly unattractive. Yet here, every aspect of this EP is a tiny detail of a larger concept that takes the already baffling, catchy existence of egg punk and flings it into a place of John Carpenter-isms. The EP is out now on Psychals ' Bandcamp.
