Lycia - The Ice Age of Gothic

An unprecedented fusion of industrial, gothic, psychedelia, new age and ambient music. A crescendo of bleak, solemn symphonies, steeped in a sense of suspense and apocalypse. All this and much more is Lycia, the project of guitarist Michael Van Portfleet. "The name," he explains, "comes from my interest in Greek mythology. I wanted something that had a musical sound and evoked the myths of Hellenistic culture."

Van Portfleet was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but lived for a long time in the Mesa desert in Arizona, a land that has produced many new talents, starting with Calexico. But while Joey Burns' band expresses the warmer, dreamier spirit of the desert, Lycia embodies its darker, more desolate side. Their music is indeed a slow ordeal through arid, anguished lands, devoid of life and wrapped in metaphysical darkness. A true philosophical meditation on death, one that shuns the macabre clichés of certain dark-rock to veer instead toward cosmic music, brushing against the tones of requiem and Gregorian chant.

It all begins in 1989 with Wake, an album Van Portfleet records together with John Fair (bass and rhythm-box). The record is still an experimental sketch, but it already highlights some of Lycia's hallmarks: dreamlike, gloomy atmospheres that manage to merge Brian Eno and Dead Can Dance. The starting point, however, is the British gothic of Joy Division, Bauhaus and early Cure, who remain among Van Portfleet's favorite artists (along with Swans, Steve Roach and CindyTalk). This is how the bleak melody of "Sing like siren", one of his earliest classics, comes to life.

With keyboardist Dave Galas on board, Lycia releases Ionia, where it truly begins its journey into the most restless and unsettling recesses of the soul. Its sound is made of anguished whispers and faint melodies, funeral marches ("This moment") and cosmic digressions ("November"). A nihilistic sense of death dominates: "Humanity is gripped by despair," says Van Portfleet. "A lot of people don't admit it, but I feel they sense it in their subconscious. In my music I try to channel all of that. I know this emptiness exists around me, even though in my own life I try to ignore it, in order to live happily. But I know the darkness is out there, and it's hard to avoid it. Maybe the only secret lies in inner balance, and that's what I've always focused on."

The following A Day In The Stark Corner is an even more mature album, alternating melodic moments with electronic apocalypses. A record that, says Van Portfleet, "has to do with the most chaotic and dark side of dreams and emotions." Standout gems include the chilling symphony of "And through the smoke and nails", the instrumental "Pygmalion", the icy score of "The morning breaks so cold and gray" and the thrilling pace of "Goddess of the green fields". The electronic keyboards echo cosmic atmospheres, but they don't compromise the fundamentally earthly nature of Lycia's music. Music that could serve as the backdrop to an Apocalypse liturgy. Is it "the end of the world"? "Yes, the world will end one day," says Van Portfleet. "Maybe the earth will be swallowed by the sun. But I see this as a physical phenomenon, with nothing supernatural about it."

After the "industrial" digression of Bleak, a side experiment by Michael Van Portfleet and Dave Galas, comes Lycia's fourth work, The Burning Circle And Then Dust (1995). The album sees the guitar return to the forefront at the expense of the keyboards, now relegated to the background. The tone remains gloomy, but less apocalyptic. A few glimmers of light filter into Van Portfleet's darkness, leaving room for romantic symphonies like "August", which echoes early King Crimson, joyful melodies like "The better things to come", and even Doors-style "ragas" like "In the fire and flames". In short, there's an air of salvation and redemption, albeit one that has to contend with a constant underlying tension.

Having moved from the Arizona desert to the snow-capped mountains of Ohio, Van Portfleet decides to record a concept album devoted to winter. "My work," Van Portfleet explains, "has always been shaped by the climate and environment around me. Before it was the desert, with its sense of isolation and repression, but also of open spaces and light. Now it's Ohio's turn. I spent months at the window watching the snow-covered trees and fields. A winter in the Ohio countryside can be as desolate as a summer in the desert, and just as fascinating."

This is how Cold (1996) comes about, a majestic work of rarefied elegance, built around the litanies of singer Tara Vanflower, in the vein of Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance.

A return to gothic? "We're glad the gothic crowd appreciates us," says Tara Vanflower, "but I don't think our music can be pinned down to one specific category. I think Lycia ranges across various genres: 80s guitar rock, a touch of industrial, ambient, space rock, gothic, country, and, why not, even rock'n'roll."

The sound of Cold is steeped in a nightmarish atmosphere, chilling and claustrophobic, which opens with the solemn march of "Frozen" and gradually takes shape through funereal symphonies like "Drifting", frozen watercolors like "Polaris" or hypnotic trances like "December". The backdrop is a blend of hypnotic melodies, electronic drones, childlike chants, and the funereal tolling of bells.

Cold marks the pinnacle of Lycia's visionary, metaphysical art. It's a peak that wouldn't be matched by the following Estrella (1998), where the partnership with Tara Vanflower loses much of its magical, esoteric allure. There are still some high points, like the spectral march of "Tainted" or the cosmic psychedelia of "Orion". But the impression is that Lycia had lost their way. Not long after, Van Portfleet himself would announce his retirement from the scene.

The return with Tripping Back Into The Broken Days (2003) accentuates the "ambient" side of Lycia's music, but in doing so it progressively dilutes its fervor and unease. Amid electronic drones, guitar arpeggios and echoes lost in the void, fragments of soft-ambient-dark-pop surface, like the refined opener "Broken Days" or the mystical "Gray December Desert". "Give Up The Ghost" offers the most spectral, dramatic moments, while the instrumental intro of "Vacant Winter Day" marks another inspired foray into those crepuscular sounds so dear to Van Portfleet. Overall, a record that doesn't add much to what Estrella already laid out.

After ten years of silence — broken only by a small EP ("Fifth Sun", 2010) — 2013 brings Quiet Moments, which stands as a perfect synthesis of the American band's ambient, dark, glacial soul. In it, like some rare essence, we find a minimal dimension, pared to the bone, lucid with an opaque, dreamlike light. Here the guitar parts and the more industrial-leaning rhythms all but disappear, in favor of an ethereal vision that follows the path once trodden by Dead Can Dance and, in part, This Mortal Coil, albeit with a more pronounced ambient embrace that turns the opening title track and "The Visitor" into two parallel paths, built on thin ice, leading us into the seemingly motionless, eternal world of "Antarctica" and "Greenland".

Lycia's lesson left a fundamental mark on the whole dark aesthetic. They heightened the spiritual and metaphysical dimension of "rock of darkness". They updated the canons of rock with the intuitions of ambient, new age and cosmic music. And they created memorable albums on the small Projekt label (founded by Sam Rosenthal of Black Tape For A Blue Girl), never once compromising with the record industry machine (which, in turn, always ignored them). Another name, then, to add to the list of great musicians unjustly overlooked in rock history.

In the summer of 2015 came A Line That Connects; the concept behind their tenth album is the line connecting all things, past and future, near and far, a trait d'union much like the one linking the cold industrial beats of Wake to this new studio record, where Mike VanPortfleet reunites with his longtime travel companions, Tara VanFlower and David Galas.

The excellent production, never this crystalline before, and the emphasis on Galas's guitar are both unmistakable: a sharp turn from the stretched-out ambient-wave of the previous Quiet Moments.

The hazy atmospheres of some tracks give way to a vehement yet melodic gothic-rock that presents a Lycia unlike anything heard before in several respects, full of distortion and unusual bursts of speed. A new "version" of the band that satisfies both newcomers and seasoned listeners alike: their trademarks are all present, and their forays outside the "genre" are handled with uncommon skill.

In Flickers came out in 2018 on the historic label that gave so much to the darkest, most ethereal sounds on American soil — we're talking about Sam Rosenthal's Projekt (Sam Rosenthal, formerly of Black Tape For A Blue Girl), the very label that launched the band at the start of the Nineties with the pitch-black "Ionia".

It's a fairly varied record (considering the range of possible approaches), since it makes good use of the various shades that have defined Lycia's sound over the years. The album is a solid, if at times uneven, return, held back here and there by a few less inspired passages (particularly "34 Palms" and "Rewrite"). But anyone who appreciates Lycia's newer, more recent direction will find more than one reason to be satisfied here.

Lycia's journey thus gains a new chapter, at times as serene as a snow-covered night, at times as imposing as a winter sea: once again a work of great quality, crafted by true artisans of beauty whose music, like a fine wine, has gained new shades with the passing of the years.

Meanwhile Lycia forge a fruitful partnership with Avantgarde Music, the Italian label that reissues Ionia on vinyl for the first time and also releases the EP Casa Luna (2021).

It's a couple of livelier tracks that make this new release especially tasty, but both "Except" and "Galatea" are actually songs dug up from the past (1989) that Mike had never released. Here, synths and atmospheric layers take shape through an obsessive beat that seems to drive some kind of ghostly dance: while the first is a more shadowy, traditional composition, with "Galatea" Lycia stumble onto that unexpected hit where the main melody becomes pure oxygen to breathe in.

Tara's ethereal voice timidly appears on the understated opener "A Quiet Way To Go", before materializing with force on the experimental "Do You Bleed?", a composition that brings back all those morbid goth-industrial traits that have marked certain stretches of the band's career (rounded out here by David Galas and John Fair). More curious is the brief, semi-acoustic detour of "On The Mezzanine", a sort of flamenco steeped in dark flavor that builds in intensity toward a fascinating but all-too-brief epilogue, a rather original diversion that deserved a more substantial running time. The closing "Salt & Blood" seems to carry that thread forward, while still leaving room for the purely supernatural character of Lycia, the same quality that comes through in the cover image (a photograph taken by Vanflower herself).

Six quality tracks that once again get under your skin.

Contributions by Michele Guerrini ("Quiet Moments"), Lorenzo Pagani ("A Line That Connects") and Paolo Chemnitz ("In Flickers", "Casa Luna")

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